Van Gogh and the End of Nature
Published on 25. June 2024
Book
Hardback
200 pages
978-0-300-27436-3 (ISBN)
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
"Van Gogh has never seemed more relevant. This stands as my favorite book of the year in any genre."-John Vincler, Cultured
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.
"Van Gogh has never seemed more relevant. This stands as my favorite book of the year in any genre."-John Vincler, Cultured
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.
Reviews / Votes
"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"A major scholarly achievement . . . which manages to be a page-turner of a story too. And, it's coffee-table worthy . . . . Van Gogh has never seemed more relevant. This stands as my favorite book of the year in any genre."-John Vincler, Cultured
"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
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
77 color + 7 b-w
Dimensions
Height: 258 mm
Width: 184 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
806 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-27436-3 (9780300274363)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Michael Lobel is professor of art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His previous book, John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration, was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art.