Van Gogh and the End of the World by Michael LobelVan Gogh and the End of the World by Michael Lobel
Van Gogh and the End of the World by Michael Lobel

Van Gogh and the End of Nature

$45

By Michael Lobel 

“[A] revealing study. . . . The fine-grained analysis and lively prose delight. Art history buffs will want to add this to their bookshelves.”—Publishers Weekly

“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

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.

Hardcover
200 Pages | 77 Color + 7 BW
Yale University Press, 2024
7.2 x 0.8 x 10 inches
ISBN 9780300274363
Vincent van Gogh, Monograph

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