Lecture: "The Nature (and 'Nature') of Impressionist Landscape" with Harmon Siegel (Nov. 18, 2025)

To complement the Museum’s nineteenth-century collections, the McMullen welcomes former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Harmon Siegel. The impressionists painted nature. Or did they? Looking closely at their paintings of the Seine, Siegel shows how the artists pictured engineering systems that remade the river to suit human society. The extent to which these works bear traces of technological intervention, leads to the question of whether they painted not nature but "nature," a delusion our species indulges to excuse our destruction of the environment. Resisting this impulse, Siegel will argue instead that the impressionists refused to treat humans as something apart from nature but rather sought to picture humanity’s place within it. Harmon Siegel's writing on art history has appeared in venues such as Art Bulletin, American Art, and Texte zur Kunst. He is also a critic, regularly reviewing contemporary exhibitions for Artforum, where—especially relevant to this evening's subject, his essay "Ecoformalism" appeared in October. His book is Painting with Monet (2024).