Van Gogh and the End of Nature, by Michael Lobel. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024. 190 pages.
GASWORKS, A COKE FACTORY, a slag heap. These are not things a viewer expects to find in one of Dutch Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh’s landscape paintings, typically associated with color-saturated views of the countryside. Perhaps they ought to. In Michael Lobel’s new book, he argues that both industry and its environmental harms pulsate across the artist’s body of work. Lobel locates van Gogh’s modernity not in the psychic depths he plumbed nor in his formal experimentation (and certainly not in his many sunflower paintings). Instead, Lobel shows us a van Gogh embedded in what we might call, to borrow the words of Andreas Malm, fossil capital: a hegemonic economic system consolidated in the nineteenth century and predicated on the burning of fossil fuels.
Why has it taken us so long to understand this about van Gogh? Impressionism’s attentiveness to the conditions of industrial modernity is well established. Railroads, transit infrastructure, and steam power are recurrent features in famous paintings by Gustave Caillebotte, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and others. Also recurrent are the effects of alienation, reflexivity, and mediation that accompanied the ascendancy of technological modernity. Even the tonal structure of the urban environments the Impressionists portrayed and the literal materials with which they painted were generated by industrial dye and pigment manufacturing.
Vincent van Gogh, the textbook story goes, chose a different path, rejecting the cosmopolitanism and the bourgeois preoccupations of the Impressionist movement, famously seeking out rural spaces and provincial ways of living that might proffer greater authenticity. Idiosyncratic and expressive, his paintings capture a world that vibrated with hidden intensities. Van Gogh’s physical and artistic retreat from urban modernity has led many to assume the artist was immersed in nature. Lobel’s book rails against this characterization, and with good reason. (Every time he hears someone praise van Gogh as the “quintessential painter of nature,” Lobel confesses in the book’s opening lines, “I feel like my head is going to explode.”)
It might seem obvious that “painter of nature” is simply not an adequate description of an artist who intensely, even obsessively visualized the social world of humans. But the deeper problem lies in the casual deployment of the term “nature” itself. For what is really meant by “nature”? You’d struggle to find a late-nineteenth-century European landscape painting that wasn’t somehow enmeshed—materially, conceptually, economically, or logistically—in the transformations visited upon the natural environment by a century of rapacious industrialization.
Naive talk of “nature” has been theoretically suspect for a long time now. Lobel takes his title from Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature, in which anthropogenic climate change is said to mark the radical termination of a model of nature as pure, wild, and autonomous. Trenchant critiques since by Philippe Descola, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and others have explored the catastrophic wrongheadedness of believing that nature is an entity that even can or should be understood as separable from human life. While their approaches differ, these writers underscore that the nature/culture dichotomy is (insofar as such a thing has ever really existed) a Eurocentric and oftentimes misogynist formulation that has prevented people from entering into true solidarity with the world.
Lobel offers his important corrective by foregrounding van Gogh’s multifaceted intimacy with the operations of industry—even at the very moment when, having moved to Arles in the South of France, he is thought to have embraced nature most fully. Through thematically organized chapters on air, earth, fire, water, and color, Lobel argues that van Gogh’s art was aware of and responsive to industrial manufacturing and pollution. Written in playful, disarming language, the book achieves the unlikely feat of coupling intellectual seriousness with an infectious sense of fun. Early on, the reader is asked to envision a hypothetical exhibition titled “Van Gogh: Smokestacks” that would gather the surprisingly large number of his works featuring dark plumes of smoke surging from distant factories and trains. Such a show would “[jolt] us out of our habitual sense of what van Gogh’s images are supposed to look like, and the subjects on which we expect them to focus.” In many regards, the book does just that.
In the opening chapter, Lobel traces van Gogh’s artistic trajectory alongside a growing public and scientific awareness of the toxic effects of atmospheric pollution. We learn that the artist was staying in central London in the winter of 1873, when a deadly sulfuric fog spread through the city. By the age of twenty, then, he had already been a firsthand witness to the life-imperiling degradation of the very air he breathed. With this in mind, the swoops of dark pigment that hang low in his painted skies, often hovering just above a chimney, take on a new and menacing significance.
Landscape is the primary but not the only genre of van Gogh’s work that Lobel rereads. The artist’s famous portraits of Joseph Roulin and his family are usually interpreted as testament to the artist’s friendship with the postman, who supported him during his breakdown in Arles. But as Lobel points out, Roulin wasn’t a generic postman. He was more specifically a depot worker who loaded and unloaded mail from trains. Roulin therefore emblematized the technological infrastructure that mediated the artist’s contact with the world. The Roulin portraits can be understood as affective documents, but they are also “a stand-in for the postal system, an extensive modern network of communication and transport that had come to assume outsize importance for [van Gogh] and his work.”
At its most provocative, the book proposes that van Gogh’s art was reliant upon and even benefited from industrial pollution. For example, we see how the uncanny luminosity of coal-powered gas lighting was wielded to great artistic effect in several of his important late paintings. In addition to his now-beloved pictures of cypress trees, van Gogh portrayed polluted waterways and stone quarries. Like many of his Impressionist predecessors, he also used pigments derived from coal tar, an industrial by-product. How, one wonders, might van Gogh have understood this practice in light of the many months he spent as an evangelist among the coal miners of a mining-intensive region in Belgium known as the Borinage? After all, Lobel notes that van Gogh opined what “a beautiful painting” the region’s despoiled, blackened terrain would make. Impressively, Lobel takes care not to attribute a purely ecological sensibility to van Gogh, through which we might imagine the artist heroically bemoaning the environmental harms he witnessed. Van Gogh’s ambivalence on this point makes him a more, not less, compelling figure.
At its most provocative, the book proposes that van Gogh’s art was reliant upon and even benefited from industrial pollution.
The case of van Gogh is an instructive one, in no small measure because of the artist’s hyper-canonical status. Yet he was hardly an outlier in historical terms. Smokestacks were a routine feature of late-nineteenth-century Western European landscapes and cityscapes because, after all, they were a routine feature of the physical environment itself. This was coming into view even in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Artists like the German painter Caspar David Friedrich produced seemingly immersive romantic landscapes that were profoundly shaped by the industrial timber harvesting and mineral extraction taking place within their settings. The British artist J. M. W. Turner famously documented with unflinching vividness the inferno-like energy of steam power. Later on, the Belgian artist (and contemporary of van Gogh) Constantin Meunier portrayed coal-mining landscapes that appear as if they have pictorially absorbed the conceptual and material logic of waste earth material.
We are overdue for a reckoning with nineteenth-century European painting and its participation in the consolidation of an economic system predicated on the self-accelerating extraction of natural resources, the hegemonic power of a fossil-based energy regime, and the asymmetrical distribution of irreparable harm to people and environments in colonial and economic peripheries. While some understanding of art’s relationship to this system has already surfaced, as in past discussions of the presence of industrialization in Impressionism, the focus has overwhelmingly fallen on the social and psychic effects of industrial modernity. Recent histories of photography have done well to bring into focus that medium’s embeddedness in mineral extraction. We have yet to properly account for how paintings bore witness to the rise of a new way of conceptualizing and treating the natural world.
Apprehending such a history—especially the relationship between nineteenth-century European landscape painting and extractive capitalism—requires us to reexamine whatwas being represented in artworks (as in, to recognize how artworks portrayed the literal subject matter of extractive industries like timber harvesting in Europe as well as its colonies). But even more importantly, we need to think differently about how environments were represented. By this, I mean that we must undertake the work of analyzing whether a given pictorial structure was aligned or misaligned with the imperatives of extraction. How could an artwork depict a natural environment in a manner that allowed the viewer to identify a certain component as a resource available to be removed, optimized, and monetized? Equally, which pictorial strategies would introduce friction into the viewer’s ability to do so? Such questions have the potential to put pressure on our existing understanding of spectatorship, too. Were certain modes of vision conscripted into the service of extraction? The panoramic viewpoint adopted in many landscapes, for example, could imply that the ease with which the viewer’s eye moves across the painted terrain bespeaks an environment across which natural resources and economic value can transit unimpeded. The iterative formal structure of Monet’s The Coalmen, ca. 1875, evokes an endlessly replenishable supply of fossil-based energy to the modern city. Monet’s favored trope of cloudlike steam that dissolves the linear contours of modern transit infrastructure might have helped viewers convince themselves of the lightness and insubstantiality of combustive energy. It also reproduced, in pictorial terms, the viewer’s blindness to the material conditions of their industrially transformed environment.
The methodological tools available for a new accounting of nineteenth-century European art are numerous. We could consider, for example, whether a landscape employs a depletionary aesthetic—that is, per Elizabeth Miller, whether it registers the terminal exhaustion that accompanied a growing nineteenth-century awareness of the finite supply of earthly resources. We might query, as Michel Serres once did of Turner, how certain formal devices in a picture reflect the logic of a given energy regime. Turner was not the only artist whose work was invested in the conversion of fuel into power, especially if we are willing to think metaphorically. Following Macarena Gómez-Barris, we could examine how paintings affirm or resist the interlocking extractability of resources, people, and territories through a radical re-thinking of Orientalist landscape paintings.
The nineteenth century witnessed the ascendancy of not just industrialization but the entire system of extractive capitalism that came to dominate European modernity. Some artworks naturalized this transition. Others enshrined a view of the world that was unassimilable with its protocols. Nearly all of them were rooted—in some form or other—in the transformations unfolding across Europe and its colonial networks. Lobel’s book leaves open the question of where van Gogh’s art might have been positioned along such a spectrum. In doing so, it allows a much more interesting van Gogh to come into view.
Stephanie O’Rourke is senior lecturer in art history at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where she focuses on nineteenth-century art, resource extraction, and scientific knowledge production.
