Michael Lobel’s new monograph on Van Gogh’s work, Van Gogh and the End of Nature (Yale University Press, 2024) undertakes a systematic effort, brilliantly argued and researched, at showing the redeeming visual capacities of the nineteenth century painter towards the natural world. If we call it redeeming it is because in more than one way, Van Gogh, in the last three decades of the modernizing century, was painting at the threshold of nature that soon enough was assaulted by the copious designs of modern industrialization, energy production, and the application of its effective scientific techniques over all spheres of life. It is the final culmination of the disenchantment of the world, and so also the moment of great temptations, such as standing up against it through the metaphorization of the imago naturae in one last desperate attempt at salvation through a reified ideal representation. Lobel’s art historical work shows us along the way that Van Gogh’s situation was far more complex, and that a French critic’s quip that he merely “captured nature with a soul” in his pictures requires specification and analytical comprehension within the context of the century of steam (Lobel 2). 

In other words, Van Gogh is not a painter of a return to the conscience of the “Beautiful Soul” that has interiorized the exhaustion of artistic imagination; implicitly throughout Lobel’s monograph is the well grounded intuition that Van Gogh was an artist of the depth of vision without necessarily translation their specular commitment to the efficacy of realism. Immersed in his age as every artist obviously is, Van Gogh’s vision is mediated and conditioned by the effects of modernization that will severely affect the act of looking and gazing. This is not exclusively reduced to the new subject of labour production of the industrial age, although certainly there in his mining drawings, but also ecological transformations such as pollution, gaslight, geographical sites, the new chemistry of color pigments, and the tonality of human expressivity (the hues of a human face) in its new surroundings. Although there is no ambition in offering (or modifying) a theory of modernity in Lobel’s account of Van Gogh, one is reminded in the historical documentation the total and integral dimension of modernity in terms of its spatial totality: the essence of modernity was a revolution in the immanence of forms and perceptions that transcended the mere mechanization of the atmospheric designs.

Thus, when Van Gogh gazed at a peasant field and saw the isolated and orderly harvest he was simultaneously preferring the composition of the color palette of a painter that is now conscious of the material elements of his process of production (Lobel 9). But the colors return to the field, and this already provides us with a symptom of Van Gogh’s pictorial signature – which again runs implicitly throughout the book without ever coming to the forefront – about retaining the outlook towards nature and the natural world, which for the painter it becomes the enduring task to be resolved in manifold ways. But there is one way in which Van Gogh tries to tackle this drift to the infinite vanishing of nature: the capacity to move visually through space. To this end, Lobel does well to remind us that Van Gogh, perhaps more than any other artist of his time, was able to travel places thanks to the new rail system efficiently connecting regions and cities that made his work possible (Lobel 28). But besides the autobiographical standpoint, what is noteworthy is how Van Gogh trained his vision to capture industrial air pollution, trainlines, malformations of the land the end of Parisian Montmartre, and of course, the starry skies of Arles transformed by the new coal driven modern gas lamps. In all of these figural vistas, Van Gogh is always situated somewhere above the territory looking outwards, and in this way, attentive to the transformation of the exterior world; insisting whether there is any exteriority out there in the world at all (it does seem he thought there were).

Van Gogh prefigures as a painter of the eclipse of the world because it is a world in which the very notion of horizon (and thus of landscape) enters into a terminal crisis. Lobel brings to our attention Avenue de la Gare with Plane (1888) that captures this problem: here is a picture where the line of the horizon in the foreground mutates into the main PLM train line from Arles to Marseille (Lobel 33). The rail line cuts through the horizon becoming the new transcendental vector of progress; the axis of movement that carries the world forward. And yet there is something visually “earthly” in Van Gogh’s pictorial works that drives our gaze downwards; it is a symptom of its grounded vision, but also, for Lobel, of his tense relation with the temporal mobilization of modernity, as if seeking rest and detention (Lobel 43). What are the sources of this tension? Does it mean that it is never resolved? These are questions that are poorly tackled in Lobel’s book, and that remain attached strictly to art historical documentation and archival sources. But these are nonetheless fundamental questions de ayer y hoy, as the Spanish saying goes.

One could linger in the question of visual grounding in Van Gogh’s work – a perspective (although not just an optical question) that permeates his work, even when there is no outside field as a visual referent, such as the well known The Night Café (1888), where the billiard table seems to slide down towards the spectator, making the true and ultimate actor of the painting the intense and palpable wooden floor (Lobel 90). But the same could apply to the perspective of the Roi Canal or the starry skies over the Rhône, the examples abound. Is there something about vision and grounding that offers a point of entry into Van Gogh’s proposal to look into the cage of modernity one last time in order to find some non-space solace of the resting gaze? Could one argue that this “tension” – between horizontal closure and downwards grounding – his personal response to what T.J. Clark called when analyzing Pissarro, the “ongoing vileness of our epoch of transition”? [1]. It is hard to tell because, unlike Pissarro, Lobel tells us nothing about Van Gogh’s political views. 

However, we do know that at a young age Van Gogh wanted to pursue theological studies that he soon gave up for visual arts (Lobel 74). Could it be that his insistence towards the ground is resolutely theological, as if he wanted to retain the god of place (theos aisthetos) as the ungraspable region for extraction and production, the new axiological order of the industrial age? Lobel’s does well to cite Victor Hugo at the beginning of the second chapter “Earth” about the outskirts quarries and sewages of Montmartre: “a variety of those misshapen fungi from the underside of civilization” (Lobel 68). It all seems that even when he was not attending to capture the limits of Montmartre, the fields of Arles, or the domestic spaces, Van Gogh’s provokes a downward descension into the ground that invites any participating space. Looking at the vanishing world one last time needs a ground from which to stand and retain a sensible distance; that very distance that the nascent bourgeois world will effectively dissolve giving up on the cohabitation between life and nature into generic and massive alienation. 

The question of the ground perspective is also corroborated by Van Gogh’s interest in strong and emphatic hues for his picture, learning from the previous generation of artists that “all the colors that Impressionism has made fashionable are unstable” (Lobel 149). In other words, the effect of color for the Impressionists, including Seurat and Pissarro, is too dialectical, which means that the tension evolving from the ground is immediately resolved between color and form, the orderly and the interdependence of the composition for stable appearance. This allows us to consider that one of Van Gogh’s key signatures – his almost bombastic and expressive use of colors – have something intimate, and perhaps also secret, to the spatial-temporal closure of modernity and its contingencies. I do accept Lobel’s suggestion that Van Gogh seized the opportunity of new industrial non-natural hues in order to mitigate the coming lackluster world oriented towards production, extraction, and human survival. For Van Gogh color becomes the barrister to gaze firmly upon the fleeting temporization of the highly visible and transparent world of disenchantment and total organization.

But to say color is also an artifice or short for the insistence on light, which is not the light of the new immanent world, but certainly a painterly light that transcends immanence by insisting on the irrevocable character of places, arrangements, inhabitation, and contingency of phenomena. This is painting at its best against the vile epoch of transition, that has extended itself as the transition of the end of the modern epoch into our present. The ruins of Van Gogh’s industrial materials allow Michael Lobel to come full circle about Van Gogh’s inscription in the modern age (Lobel 153). But we should not let go of the idea that while materials do decompose and rot, the painter’s ultimate material utensil is nothing but light, and this means “a thinking of light, an image that is aware of the relation that light has with things. This matter is equally concrete”, as Monica Ferrando has recently advised [2]. Is not the descending lux the sensorial condition for disclosing the gradual proximity between vision and ground? It is with this exterior lighting as pictorial praxis that Van Gogh stood as a madman and a witness to the endless night of our disappearing our world.

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Notes 

1. T.J. Clark. “We Field-Women”, Farewell to an idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999), 109. 

2. Monica Ferrando. “From History to Anarchy: The Painting of Louis Comtois in the Thought of Reiner Schürmann”, Philosophy Today, Vol.68, Fall 2024, 875.