We are pleased to introduce, for this first conference of the season, Lucile Cordonnier (PhD, McGill) and Anouk Elias-Pinsonnault (MA, UQAM), who invite us to think about art in its relationship to the environment, from the chemistry of artworks to environmental affects. The session will be moderated by Anne-Sophie Miclo.
October 21, 2026, 5:30 p.m.
Fonderie Darling
745 Ottawa Street, Montréal
“A Chemical Commission: An Ecological Study of Maurice Denis’s La Légende de saint Hubert (1895–1897),” by Lucile Cordonnier
In 1895, the politician and collector Denys Cochin commissioned Maurice Denis to decorate the walls of the study in his Parisian townhouse. The eight paintings of La Légende de saint Hubert (The Legend of Saint Hubert, 1895–1897, Musée Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye) combine the depiction of a hunt on horseback in the forest of Fontainebleau, a portrait of the Cochin family, the hagiography of Saint Hubert, and the tale of Victor Hugo’s La Légende du beau Pécopin (The Legend of Beau Pécopin). These four narrative threads aim to elevate the Cochin family’s social standing and their dominion over the land. Indeed, part of the family’s fortune came from investments in the chemical fertilizer industry. It is therefore worth questioning the materiality of the landscape depicted in this decorative cycle. What agricultural and forestry practices come into play in the portrait of a region on the threshold of modernity? How can nature be conceived alongside (or in opposition to) the industrial modernization of these practices? How did art account for the biological change brought about by these practices?
In this paper, I aim to open up the traditional discourse on nineteenth-century landscape painting, which holds that landscape was, for many artists, the privileged path to a modern language and to ecological and environmental concerns. Nineteenth-century art history can refocus its gaze on the economic mechanisms that surface in landscape painting. La Légende de saint Hubert is a particularly relevant case: this decorative cycle depicts an agricultural region undergoing rapid modernization, a modernization fuelled in part by the industrial investments of the Cochin family, who commissioned the cycle.
“From the Museum to the Political: Environmental Emotions in Contemporary Art,” by Anouk Elias-Pinsonnault.
My paper will address the circulation of affects in the context of contemporary art and the sixth mass extinction (O’Key 2023). How do certain artworks shape and orient the experience of environmental emotions among museum visitors? To this end, I will take as my central case study Lucienne Rickard’s Extinction Studies (2019–2020), along with Allora & Calzadilla’s The Great Silence (2014) and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Resurrecting The Sublime (2019), three works that address the phenomenon of extinction and are presented in museum settings.
The paper will begin with an overview of the social context marked by the “crisis of sensibility” (2020), a notion theorized by Baptiste Morizot. From this perspective, the current ecological crisis appears as the consequence of a rupture of the sensible: by no longer fully perceiving nonhumans as partners in a shared world, we have made their exploitation and destruction possible. I therefore argue that renewing our interspecies relationships can come about, in particular, through art.
To continue the discussion, John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy (1934) offers an interesting starting point: conceiving emotion as the result of an interaction between the individual and their environment, he holds that it precedes action. From this standpoint, Dewey helps me understand how artworks can serve as incubators for emotions, thereby facilitating their transformation into tangible action beyond the museum walls.
Finally, I draw on the theoretical field of phenomenology, calling on authors such as Sara Ahmed (2014) to discuss political emotions. Circulating between individuals and objects, emotions are understood to be experienced socially. Together with Judith Butler’s notion of “grievable” (2004), this approach allows me to situate emotions within power dynamics that distribute them unequally.
Biography of the Moderator, Anne-Sophie Miclo
Anne-Sophie Miclo is an art historian. She holds a PhD in art history from the Université du Québec à Montréal and also teaches as a course lecturer. For fifteen years, she has been conducting research on the history and processes of musealization of living artworks and exhibitions. She is currently carrying out postdoctoral research at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, titled Sixty Years of Living Artworks in Canadian Museums (1960–2020), supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC). She is also a member of the Art et musée team (FRQSC 2022–2026).
Anne-Sophie Miclo has notably contributed to the edited volumes Réinventer la collection. L’art et le musée au temps de l’événementiel (2023), published by PUQ, and Animals, Plants and Afterimages: The Art and Science of Representing Extinction (2022), Berghahn Books, Oxford.
Areas of research or expertise: museology of the living, relations between art and animal studies.