10:30 AM – 10:40 AM

INTRODUCTION
Fernando Oliva, Curator, MASP 

10:40 AM – 12:00 PM
Roundtable

CAROLINE SHIELDS
Monet’s Industrial Ecology 

While living in Argenteuil, Monet depicted factories, railway bridges, and the Seine with a careful balance between nature, human activity, and industry. Is this harmony a vision for what we now call “industrial ecology”? We know that the Seine, pristine and shimmering in Monet’s hands, was in fact filthy during the years he lived in Argenteuil—the dream he conjured was already slipping away. In his paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare, the relationship between humanity and industry is not observed from a distance, but embodied—these sensorially charged, affective paintings press upon the experience of the human body amidst hulking machines. Monet then abandoned the subject of industry for decades, returning to it only in London, where industry’s by-products infuse the air. Viewing Monet’s paintings from Argenteuil, Paris, and London through the lens of industrial ecology offers a framework for considering the artist’s differing relationship to nature and industry across these works.

MARIANNE MATHIEU
Monet Gardner and Landscaper: Vision of Arcadia and Romanticism of Pollution

The figure of Monet—both painter and gardener—leader of Impressionism on the one hand, and creator of the illustrious garden of Giverny on the other, has become a symbol of ecology in the increasingly acute context of the global climate crisis. Through the evocation of his work as a gardener and painter, we propose to shed light on Monet’s relationship to nature in general, and to landscape in particular, in order to highlight two antagonistic components of his approach: the celebration of an Arcadian nature and the attraction to certain polluting aspects of the “modern world” according to an approach that could be described as romantic.

Mediation: Fernando Oliva, Curator, MASP

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
BREAK

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Roundtable

NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
Red Shift: Monet’s Anesthetic to the Anthropocene (1870 –1877)

In the seven years following his return from smoggy London, where he had sheltered during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (1870—1871), Claude Monet famously transformed modern art. His cityscapes of Le Havre, Paris, and Argenteuil were created by a combination of elevated and freeze-frame viewpoints with what curator Anne Roquebert has called an “automatic writing.” Monet found a new reality beyond what had previously been known or perceived. Like Monet in 1871, I have just seen a small round orange sun through a thick layer of smoke caused by the Canadian wildfires. The impression was and is horrific. It was nonetheless anesthetized, not least by Monet, in a process in which the aesthetic removes the pain. By 1877 Monet visualized blue and white steam in the Gare Saint-Lazare, rather than black smoke. The task at hand is to unpack and unlearn Monet’s automatic anesthetics to recover the red shift.

STEPHEN EISENMAN
Painting in Series: Monet and the Image of Climate Change

Monet’s paintings are a veritable textbook of nature, whose significance changes according to each successive generation’s relationship to the geophysical and socio-political world. For audiences living in an increasingly industrialized, polluted, and politically and economically volatile France at the end of the 19th century, the series of paintings must have signified a longed-for surcease of social and market pressure. Today, however, Monet’s paintings suggest a different crisis: the existential challenge of global warming. They aren’t directly about climate change—he could have had only the faintest understanding of the phenomenon—but the artist was a kind of natural scientist, and his art an inquiry into the material and optical character of the geophysical world. They thus suggest duration, transformation, decay, and human intervention in ecological systems. And they encourage viewers today to consider the causes and catastrophic impacts of environmental change and global warming, and the actions they might take to stop them.

Mediation: Laura Cosendey, Assistant Curator, MASP

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Roundtable

GÉRALDINE LEFEBVRE
Monet: First explorations of Norman territory

« C’est si beau, la mer et les ciels, les bêtes, les gens et les arbres tels que la nature les a faits » Boudin à Monet. Ecology, a term coined in 1866 by Darwinist biologist Ernst Haeckel, studies the interactions of all living beings with each other and with their environment. In his early years, Claude Monet paid close attention to the natural environment in which he grew up. Alongside Eugène Boudin, he learned to work “in the field”. For the young caricaturist, it was a revelation! He understood nature and began to analyze it in a quasi-scientific way, “with a pencil in its forms”. Through a study of the first sketchbook, drawn in the summer of 1856, we will focus on the artist’s cartography of Normandy (from Sainte-Adresse to Ingouville, from Montivilliers to Harfleur). Then, through a study of his first paintings, we will see how he brought together the constituent elements of his natural setting, developing his own form of ecological awareness.

MARIA GRAZIA MESSINA
An Ecology of Vision: Monet’s Normandy paintings

Claude Monet’s en plein air painting campaigns on the Normandy coast between 1881 and 1885, fruit of his adventurous walks on Etretat’s cliffs, have been viewed as early signs of ecological awareness. Monet offers a virgin view of these places, which he experiences as a sort of uncontaminated nature and landscape reserve, systematically removing all aspects of the contemporary booming fishing industry and tourism. This supposed ecological approach needs to be seen in a more pertinent manner, not so much in terms of a generically longed-for, organic relationship with nature as in terms of a structural and effective ecology of vision. In Monet’s case, this may be confirmed by an afresh approach to his works, as well as by written sources and critical documentation. Monet’s paintings witness a complex way of seeing, in which an energetic flow of information is collected by means of movement, and with the involvement of the entire psychomotorial system, in its adaptation and orientation within an engaging environmental context.

Mediation: Isabela Ferreira Loures, Curatorial Assistant, MASP

4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Roundtable

MICHAEL J. CALL
Darwin’s Science and the Evolution of Monet’s Aesthetics

Monet’s mature artistic technique, like Darwin’s theory, underscores humankind’s kinship with all living things. In Darwin’s world, humankind shares a common origin with all other organisms; having descended from them, we are then bound to them in a biological kinship.  In opposition to post-Renaissance art that privileges the human presence in both representation and the viewing act, Monet’s art creates a sense of virtual and visual equality, unity, and uniformity among all observable phenomena. The human—and the viewer, by extension—is thus represented as neither separate from nature as a disengaged observer or unique creation nor superior to it but rather embedded in it and co-equal with all other organic life forms surrounding it. This approach, while echoing the almost reverential awe Darwin expresses in his writings about nature and its laws, also reminds humankind of its own fragility and the hard choices it must make to avoid extinction.

ANA GONÇALVES MAGALHÃES
“A garden of colors rather than flowers”: Monet in Giverny and his paintings in the MASP collection

As Monet and his family settled in Giverny, he launched a new phase in his artistic production, culminating in his famous series of paintings and his water lilie’s ornamental project, now housed in the Musée de l’Orangerie. When he bought a property there, on the banks of a small tributary of the River Seine, the painter conceived a garden with exotic plants, employed several gardeners, and changed the tributary's course, thus shaping the surrounding nature to his will as an artist. In this talk, I will address Monet's two works in the MASP collection in regard of this “artificial paradise” that he created for himself, taking as a model what 19th-century Europeans saw as an untouched people and territory, that is, Japan—embodied in the images from the artist's collection of Japanese prints. Based on these premises, I intend to discuss the idea of ecology that circulated at that time—something that several Indigenous societies of today’s world see as typical of a white and colonialist culture.

Mediation: David Ribeiro, Curatorial Assistant, MASP
 

CAROLINE SHIELDS 
Curator of European Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto, where she has curated the exhibitions Impressionism in the Age of Industry (2019), Steam: Impressionist Painting Across the Atlantic (2022) and Cassatt—McNicoll: Impressionists Between Worlds (2023). Prior to joining the AGO in 2017, Caroline Shields held curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She holds a Doctorate in art history from the University of Maryland, where her dissertation examined Paul Gauguin’s still life paintings and the history of memory. 

MARIANNE MATHIEU
Art historian who created the International Relations Department of the Musée d’Orsay. She was also COO and Director of Collections, Exhibitions, and Research of the Musée Marmottan Monet. In 2022, she founded the ACPA agency—Advising Curating Producing Art. A specialist in Impressionist art, she has curated heritage exhibitions in France and abroad, including Impression, Sunrise: The Biography of a Painting (2014), and Monet Collector (2017), both at Musée Marmottan Monet; in 2023, Monet-Mitchell at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and Monet in Full Light in Monaco. She is the author of several essays and books on Claude Monet and Impressionism.

GÉRALDINE LEFEBVRE
Graduated from The Louvre School in Paris and Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Paris Nanterre. She was the curator of Léon Monet: Brother of the Artist and Collector, at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris (2023), and Monet-Auburtin, at the Impressionism Museum in Giverny (2019). In 2014, she participated in the exhibition Monet’s Impression, Sunrise: The Biography of a Painting (Marmottan Monet Museum). In 2016, she published Monet in Le Havre: The Decisive Years (Hazan). Today, she is preparing the catalog of Claude Monet’s drawings and is collaborating on the exhibition Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment — Musée d’Orsay, Paris/National Gallery, Washington, in 2024.

NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. An ACLS Scholars and Society Fellow in 2020-21, his most recent book is White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (2023). Mirzoeff is also the author of The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2013), and An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999). He contributed to the catalog for Gary Simmons: Public Enemy (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2023) and curated Decolonizing Appearance at the Center for Art Migration Politics, Copenhagen, in 2018-2019. Amongst his work in Visual Culture studies, his article “Visualizing the Anthropocene” (Public Culture, 2014) stands out. In this text, Mirzoeff analyzes the construction of an aesthetic of the Anthropocene in Claude Monet’s pieces.

MARIA GRAZIA MESSINA
Messina taught History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Universities of Venice and Florence. She chaired the National University Council for the History of Art, and has been a member of the Consiglio Superiore dei Beni Culturali. Her main field of research addresses the links between arts, criticism, and literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has curated several exhibitions in Galleria d’arte moderna (Turin), Museo del Novecento (Milan), Palazzo dei Diamanti (Ferrara), and Terme di Diocleziano (Rome). She collaborated with the book From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism, edited by Stephen Eisenman (2010).

MICHAEL J. CALL
Professor Emeritus of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah (USA). He holds a joint Ph.D. in French and Humanities from Stanford University. He is past president of the Humanities Education and Research Association, an international organization of interdisciplinary scholars. While on the faculty at BYU, he was awarded the Karl G. Maeser General Education Professorship, one of the university’s most prestigious teaching honors. His book, Claude Monet, Free Thinker: Radical Republicanism, Darwin’s Science, and the Evolution of Impressionist Aesthetics appeared in 2015. Other publications include Infertility and the Novels of Sophie Cottin (2002) and Back to the Garden: Chateaubriand, Senancourt, and Constant (1988).

STEPHEN EISENMAN
Professor Emeritus of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of more than a dozen books including Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames and Hudson, 1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015). He is also co-founder of the environmental justice non-profit, Anthropocene Alliance, and a regular columnist for the magazine Counterpunch. Eisenman has curated several exhibitions, including From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism (2010).

ANA GONÇALVES MAGALHÃES
Art historian, Professor, curator, and now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo. She graduated in History at the University of Campinas, took her MA in History of Art and Culture at the same university, and her Ph.D. in History and Criticism of Art at the University of São Paulo, where she is also Adjunct Professor of  History, Theory and Criticism of Art at the same university. Among her publications are Claude Monet: a canoa e a ponte (2000); Futuros possíveis: arte, museus e arquivos digitais (2014, co-author); Discours aux Tupiniquins (2015); and Boccioni in Brazil: Reevaluating the Material History of “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (2022, co-author).