Salem, Mass.

One of the provocative displays in “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,” the elaborately polemical exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, places Albert Bierstadt’s luminous “Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite” (c. 1871-73) alongside its evisceration. In Bierstadt’s painting, the cataract’s mist disperses spectral light as towering cliffs nestle Edenic wildlife. To the right is a swollen replica of the painting in a similarly gilded frame. It hangs askew, bent, its bottom melted and charred, its images...