Van Gogh and the End of Nature by Michael Lobel '90
Michael Lobel ’90 never expected to write a book on Vincent van Gogh. “If you had asked me 10 or 12 years ago if I was interested in doing scholarly research on Van Gogh, the answer would’ve been no,” says the professor of art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. “Of course, I knew Van Gogh’s work and taught it in some of my art history surveys, but I never had any thought about researching, studying, and then writing a book on Van Gogh.”
That all changed when Lobel visited Van Gogh’s gravesite in the small town of Auvers-sur-Oise outside Paris and found himself profoundly moved. “I became more interested in Van Gogh after that, and it led me to delve more deeply into aspects of his art that seemed to be regularly overlooked or avoided.”
Van Gogh and the End of Nature challenges the mainstream assumption that Van Gogh was exclusively an iconic painter of nature. Instead, Lobel reveals how Van Gogh consistently rendered elements of industrialization and pollution such as coal mines, smoky trains, and factories in his pieces. This counterpoint of industry and nature was explicit and indicated the artist’s keen awareness of the ways in which human industry infringed on the idyllic terrains of nature.
“For me, the book is very straightforward,” he explains. “Vincent van Gogh is a historical personage who lived through one of the periods of the most intense industrialization, certainly in European history and perhaps even in world history, and yet, up until this point, the impacts of industrialization on Van Gogh and his work, and his connections to industry and pollution, have not been widely examined or thought about.”
The contrast between undulating wheatfields, swirling skies, and sunflowers with gaslight, coal mines, and air pollution is striking. It’s hard to miss the tension between nature and industry that the artist observed in his environment. Lobel points out that Van Gogh even utilized coal-based pigments as part of his artistic process.
In Bridges Across the Seine at Asnières (1887), we see a bright figure in pink overlooking the river while a foreboding train rolls by on a bridge overhead. Small boats rest placidly on the water below. You can almost hear the train disrupting this peaceful scene as it barrels across the bridge. Dark smoke billows from the vehicle, tarnishing the sky. Lobel observes that “the occupants of what look to be relatively open carriages farther back, meanwhile, are in the position to receive goodly lungfuls of the engine’s heavy exhaust.”
Dividing the book into chapters titled Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Color, Lobel adopts a refreshingly forthright tone to help readers see Van Gogh’s work in a new way, with a contemporary gaze toward the ominous environmental realities of our time.
“The book is also about us today,” he shares. “This framing of Van Gogh as someone who somehow lived through a time of massive industrialization but that it had no impact on his work—it’s doing us a disservice. To mention just one relevant example, large areas of Los Angeles have recently been devastated by fires fueled by climate change. Even though he was a historical figure and died in 1890, Van Gogh’s work and the way people have dealt with his art have a lot to teach us about taking our world seriously.”
