Description

A groundbreaking reassessment that foregrounds Van Gogh’s profound engagement with the industrial age while making his work newly relevant for our world today

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is most often portrayed as the consummate painter of nature whose work gained its strength from his direct encounters with the unspoiled landscape. Michael Lobel upends this commonplace view by showing how Van Gogh’s pictures are inseparable from the modern industrial era in which the artist lived-from its factories and polluted skies to its coal mines and gasworks-and how his art drew upon waste and pollution for its subjects and even for the very materials out of which it was made. Lobel underscores how Van Gogh’s engagement with the environmental realities of his time provides repeated forewarnings of the threats of climate change and ecological destruction we face today.

Van Gogh and the End of Nature offers a radical revisioning of nearly the full span of the artist’s career, considering Van Gogh’s artistic process, his choice of materials, and some of his most beloved and iconic pictures. Merging a timely sense of environmental urgency with bold new readings of the work of one of the world’s most acclaimed artists, this book weaves together detailed historical research and perceptive analysis into an illuminating portrait of an artist and his changing world.

Publisher Review

“Intriguing. . . . Taking what is now a topical approach, [Lobel] regards Van Gogh as warning of ‘threats of climate change and ecological destruction.'”-Martin Bailey, Art Newspaper

“In this remarkable book, Michael Lobel makes a stunning contribution to our understanding of Van Gogh, an artist seemingly so familiar as to be beyond revision. Writing with refreshing lucidity and engaging humor, Lobel substantially reframes this iconic figure of postimpressionist art by revealing-in work after work-an entire realm of environmental observation hitherto largely unnoticed by scholars.” -Susan Sidlauskas, Rutgers University

“Michael Lobel’s superb, richly illustrated book shifts Van Gogh studies in a new, far more interesting direction. Van Gogh and the End of Nature should inspire a reinvestigation of the industrial complexities that made modernism possible.” -Alan C. Braddock, author of Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

“To situate Van Gogh, the celebrated ‘painter of nature,’ as a witness, a critic, and at the same time an aesthete of the industrial despoliation of nature that inevitably marked the age of coal everywhere is a stunning achievement. Michael Lobel’s elegant-and cogently argued-book will fundamentally change our view of this important artist and greatly advance the conversation already underway between art history and the environmental humanities. A must-read for anyone interested in that conversation.” -Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

“Van Gogh worked at the dawn of a modernity marked by a shift in the relative dominance of the natural and the manmade. Lobel’s exploration of this relationship in Van Gogh’s art is fascinating!” -Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature