Lecture & Book Signing: Van Gogh with Michael Lobel

About the Talk

Michael Lobel | “Van Gogh, Industry, and the Limits of Nature”

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is an artist who has become indelibly identified with depictions of the natural world, from the variegated colorations of flowers and trees to the manifold forms of the terrain. Yet nature—both as concept and experience—was being profoundly reshaped in his time, particularly through the widespread effects of industrialization. In this lecture, author Michael Lobel will draw on works from the Barnes and other collections to consider Van Gogh’s at times conflicted position between nature and industry.

After the lecture, Lobel will sign copies of his new book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature, available for purchase at the Barnes Shop.

About the Book

Van Gogh is most often portrayed as the consummate painter of nature whose work gained its strength from his direct encounters with the unspoiled landscape. In Van Gogh and the End of Nature, 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. 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. 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.