The plein-air craze that swept French art circles in the second half of the 19th-century conjured shifts in light and atmosphere, a color-drenched movement that opened the way to modernity. Sun-stippled meadows, storm-lashed coasts, picnics in parks: all captured a growing fascination with nature as a sanctuary from the woes of a rapidly industrializing nation. The Impressionists — whose brand identity derived from the name of a Monet canvas — have come down to us as avatars of landscape painting; and yet they also embraced locomotives, coal smoke, and city fumes, from Monet’s series on the Parisian train station, Gare Saint-Lazare, to Manet’s The Railway, featuring his most famous model, Victorine Meurent.
Art historian Michael Lobel probes this contradiction in his spirited, anecdotal Van Gogh and the End of Nature, which seeks to debunk the myth of the Post-Impressionist master as a nature boy whose tawny wheatfields and roiling constellations manifested a tempestuous inner life. He argues that industrialization and pollution inform Van Gogh’s oeuvre, right down to his choice of synthetic oils. Lobel shuns a chronological approach, instead structuring his book in chapters titled after the four elements — “Air,” “Earth, “Fire,” Water” — and the additional “Color” and “Coda,” allowing him to spin ecological themes around his thesis. He writes about Van Gogh’s treatment of a sludgy canal where Provençal women washed bedsheets: “The artist’s drawing of the Roubine du Roi opens up aspects of his work in Arles that in other cases may be easy to overlook or ignore, elements that highlight industry’s impact on the landscape. In his pictures, the natural world and modern industry are repeatedly put in dialogue, tension, or conflict.”
The book pushes an agenda: Van Gogh was as much a chronicler of corrosive industrialism as an observer of the world outdoors, and we should heed his lessons in our age of catastrophic warming. Lobel begins with Van Gogh’s move to Arles in 1888, which commenced his great period and culminated in triumphs such as The Night Café and Portrait of Dr. Gachet. The author underscores that Van Gogh’s flight to Provence was not an exile from urban life; he brought an imagination forged amid factories and blight. Among Van Gogh’s late canvases, there’s a dialectic between planting scenes in Arles, emblematized by figures of plowmen and a Sower, and smoke-capped townscapes in the background, bristling with chimneys and the Iron Horses of fortunes and exploitation.
Lobel skips around, building his case with sidebars and ecological commentary. “Earth” flashes back to Van Gogh’s peripatetic twenties, when he was constantly trying on new professions, the “patron saint of career changes.” (He finally committed to painting at 27.) He’d spent over a year as a pastor in the Borinage, a mining region in southern Belgium also known as the Pays Noir (or “Black Country”), where he ministered to families struggling amid a wasteland: “The terrain was dotted with numerous hill-shaped, cone-like terrils, which were not naturally occurring formations but rather immense piles of dumped waste materials (in English, these are known variously as spoil tips or slag heaps, the specific terminology distinguishing mining refuse from that of secondary processes like smelting.) Towering industrial chimneys studded the horizon like so many mute sentries, filling the sky with smoke and soot that then fell to earth in a seemingly unceasing deluge, likened by one observer to the rains of ash that buried ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum.”
As Lobel suggests, Van Gogh’s training was conventional until it wasn’t. An early canvas, Rooftops, View from the Atelier, The Hague (1882), is a dutiful vanishing point exercise, but the painter flattens the foreground, a nod to the widespread influence of Japanese block prints, or ukiyo-e. Lobel showcases Van Gogh’s innovations, including a reed pen that refined his crosshatching technique and shaped his evocative brushwork.
Lobel’s conversational tone dodges academic jargon, immediate and inviting as Van Gogh’s rich surfaces. He’s a witty guide and sworn enemy of clichés about the artist. Occasionally his humor is too glib, as when he describes the Roubine du Roi, outside Van Gogh’s house in Arles, where he hosted Gaugin: “(I’m pretty sure we should be glad their pictures didn’t come in scratch-and-sniff versions.)” Lobel’s language sometimes tilts toward the grandiose, and his assertions are often speculative rather than concrete, as in his attempt to link Manet’s 1874 controversial picture, Argenteuil, to the Saint-Denis factory explosion. (Van Gogh was living in Paris, probably near Montmartre, and wouldn’t have been affected by the blast.)
And yet Van Gogh and the End of Nature balances somber themes with a buoyant love of the artist’s drawings and pigments. Lobel plainly adores Van Gogh. His narrative detours are delights. Early on, Lobel introduces us to a Scotsman, John Aitken, who devised an instrument, the Aitken counter, which could measure particles of dust suspended in air. Aitken conducted experiments in Hyères at the same time Van Gogh was laboring in nearby Arles, fomenting the concept of the “Aitken nucleus,” which in turn led to Nobel-lauded breakthroughs in physics; these findings had significant consequences for pollution researchers. Lobel is equally incisive on paints extracted from coal tars, which Theo Van Gogh purchased in Paris and shipped to his brother. These “coal-tar colors” brightened the palettes of the Post-Impressionists and Fauves, infusing their canvases with a trademark vibrancy as they contributed to environmental degradation: “To render the natural landscape more vividly, Van Gogh chose to rely on the artificial hues brought into being by the industrial era and the pollutants release in its wake.”
[Right: The Factory in Asnieres, 1887]. Industry, then, lurks at the margins of Van Gogh’s aesthetic, framing even Van Gogh’s nocturnal beauties. Lobel places the iconic Starry Night Over the Rhône, now hanging in the Musée d’Orsay, into this context. He flips platitudes about Van Gogh on their heads. “One of the more striking aspects of his composition for Starry Night Over the Rhône is his treatment of light reflecting on the river’s undulating surface,” Lobel observes. “The vertical forms that comprise the reflections seem way too elongated, even impossibly so, for the individual points they mirror, and they appear to reflect only the town’s lights and not those of the stars above …. A similar impulse animates his images of the Roubine du Roi, in which the reflections on the canal serve to accentuate the smokestack’s physical form. In these images, water takes on a key role, becoming a means to highlight the presence of industry, and even at times to suggest the ascendancy of industrial over natural forms.”
Van Gogh and the End of Nature is more than a subtle rebuke of the painter as nature-boy savant; it’s an implicit critique of artists and their motivations. If they are susceptible to the trappings of wealth and fame — true of Monet and Degas as well — then perhaps we shouldn’t put them on pedestals; or at least we should acknowledge their ideological dissonances, their consumerist appetites and other too-human flaws. The book pleads for aggressive action on climate change, wagging an accusatory finger at us all, from sculptors to poets to Uber drivers to nurses to Presidents.
[Left: Factories in Asnieres, 1887] Because of Van Gogh’s global stature, we tend to forget the compressed timeline of his mature style. Near the end he accelerated into his genius, spurred by a sense of doom, as with Sylvia Plath’s late poems. Just as Ariel pondered the trade-offs of marriage and motherhood, Van Gogh’s canvases consider the ethical equivocations of our era, what we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of justice. One person’s moral compass is another’s afterthought. In Lobel’s view, we’re choking the planet with our extravagance. That same notion tugged at visionaries over a century ago. Shadows loom within their Mediterranean glow. “For all the massive quantities of ink that have been spilled in extolling Van Gogh’s devotion to depicting the natural world, most of us recognize, even if just intuitively, that’s not exactly what he was up to in his work,” Lobel notes. “Another way of looking at it is that he strove to convey not the actual appearance but rather a pictorial evocation of nature’s vividness and intensity, using whatever distortions and exaggerations and enhancements were needed to get us there. If at times the tools he depended upon were derived from industrial waste, so be it.”
[Published by Yale University Press on June 25, 2024, 200 pages, $45.00 hardcover. 77 color and 7 black & white images]