Was Van Gogh an environmentalist ahead of his time? » Yale Climate Connection

Vincent van Gogh: Celebrating the beauty of nature, or witnessing its demise?

News readers concerned about climate issues may recall recent examples of how climate change has affected Van Gogh's art: the infamous soup-throwing incidents in 2022 and 2024, when “Stop the Oil” protesters threw tomatoes at “Sunflowers” (1888*) Soup, a much-loved painting on display at the National Gallery in London.

The New York Times reported that protesters chose the painting simply for its high profile: “It's just 'an iconic painting, by an iconic painter,' and attacks on it would make headlines.”

However, for Michael Lobel, a professor of art history at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, there is an intrinsic connection between Van Gogh and climate change.

Although Van Gogh is often referred to as the “quintessential nature painter,” a closer look at Van Gogh's oeuvre reveals that his relationship with nature was more complex. Lobel believes that beyond simply documenting his beauty, Van Gogh's work also reflects his direct experience of his demise in the form of industrialization across the European landscape. Acknowledging Bill McKibben's 1989 book “The End of Nature,” Lobel noted that Van Gogh also understood that humans' impact on the environment could be devastating, even when beautifully rendered.

Van Gogh and the End of Nature is a fascinating blend of biography, criticism, and environmental history. Recalling the physics of the ancient world, Lobel named his first four chapters after the elements of air, earth, fire, and water, which in various combinations were thought to make up everything one could see. In the final chapter, “Color,” Lobel tells how new chemicals from fossil fuels created the brighter pigments that Van Gogh used to depict his nature.

In the book's first chapter, “Air,” Lobel shows how chimneys permeated Van Gogh's work. In the backgrounds of many paintings, plumes of black smoke billow from factories, gasworks, homes and locomotives. Depending on weather conditions, the dust, soot and smoke from his paintings can be life-threatening. Lobel believes that Van Gogh experienced this directly; he was briefly stationed in London during a toxic fog.

The coal used to power machinery and heat buildings had to be mined, resulting in the cracks and slag heaps that crisscrossed Van Gogh's landscapes. In “Earth,” Lobel examines the artist's many paintings of these scars.

Lobel then turned in “Fire” to one of Van Gogh's most beloved paintings, a night scene. Van Gogh wrote passionately about painting at night in his notebooks and letters. These passages inspired a memorable scene in the 1956 film “Lust for Life,” in which Kirk Douglas, who played Van Gogh, wore a straw hat filled with candles while violently wiping a dimly lit canvas . Lobel points out that Van Gogh relied instead on the light provided by light. gas-Burning street lamp.

Lobel's favorite night painting, “Starry Night on the Rhone,” led him into his fourth chapter, “Water.” The scene depicted is just below where Rubin-du-Roy meets the Rhone. Lobel noted that Rubin-du-Roy often stinks from raw sewage that flows from houses into street sewers and then into waterways. Smoke from coastal factories dumping volatile chemicals into the river sometimes masks organic odors and can also be dangerous.

But Lobel points out in his final chapter on “Color” that dangerous chemicals and metals were an integral part of Van Gogh's art. Several of his signature pigments—such as Paris green, galancine red, and methyl violet—contain toxic metals like arsenic, required toxic chemicals to refine, or were derived from toxic byproducts of industrialization like coal tar.

These chemically derived colors influenced the paintings of the era in other ways. The brightly colored garments that appear in many works from this period could only have been made with chemically enhanced dyes. Then, when these dyes are dumped into the factories that make them or the factories that use them, these dyes may color the streams that artists paint—at least one was impressed by the bright blue in Édouard Manet's “Argenteuil.” So surmised skeptical contemporary commentators.

Although Manet and other artists of the era also spoke of the impact of industrialization, Lobel believed that Van Gogh was a special case. “His art is deeply embedded in, if not dependent on, modern industry, and more specifically industrial pollution, which he often uses as a theme, concern, and even material for his works.”

The “Stop Oil” protesters were not wrong in provoking him.

Diane Tufte: Using photography to document environmental change

Fast forward to an artist from a very different time: photographer Diane Tuft, who has witnessed the growing impacts of climate change during her own lifetime.

Diane Tuft is an expert in aerial photography, her previous works include Arctic Melting (2017), in which she relied on the visible spectrum of light, as well as Gondwana (2012) and Invisible (2009), in which, through special film, she captured images at a frequency beyond human perception.

In the introduction to her new book, “Entropy,” Tuft reflects on her ice photographs.

The word entropy aptly describes the impact of climate change on… water. As ice melts, the molecules gain energy, disperse further, and lose their crystal structure. … This confusion intensifies as the water further transforms into a gaseous state. Water is its own thermodynamic system. … We see the unpredictability of its effects … unfolding in real time.

The 80 photographs contained in “Entropy,” mostly taken while the artist was flying in a helicopter over her chosen landscapes, document how climate change is altering the Earth's surface through droughts, epic storms and floods, and rising sea levels.

Utah's Great Salt Lake takes center stage in this book as it continues to shrink due to repeated failures in rainfall and humans diverting the streams that once fed the lake into farmland. In fact, its cover is graced by the surreal image of a lake (“Journey's End”) – a geometric pattern imposed on the natural landscape by human action.

But the consequences of these human actions are more than just aesthetic. As biology professor Bonnie Baxter points out in her article, one of two in Entropy, dry lake beds have become an increasingly dangerous health hazard. Researchers found arsenic, lead, lithium, mercury and strontium in the dust that regularly falls over communities around the lake and then into residents' homes and lungs. Thus, like the work of Van Gogh, many of Taft's photographs depict toxic landscapes.

But that's not all. Photographs of the Bengal, the Chesapeake Bay, the Florida Keys, and the Kiribati and Marshall Islands in the Pacific occupy many of the collection's pages. In these images, rising waters and violent storms are changing the terrain and reshaping their boundaries with the ocean.

These always striking images often look more like paintings than photographs. In fact, art curator Stacey Epstein sees the influence of artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Richard Diebenkorn in Diane Taft's work. But she also traces Tuft’s virtuosity to photographers such as Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston. As a former bookseller familiar with similarly oversized books, I also saw in Tufte's work work with aerial photographers such as Marilyn Bridges, J. Henry Fair, and Alex MacLean connect.

Entropy by Diane Tufte is a carefully curated collection of photographs. Like Michael Lobel revisiting Van Gogh's paintings, these images are both beautiful and disturbing. Perhaps these two books can help us understand what we are doing to the world while still choosing not to do otherwise.

* Van Gogh gave this title to two paintings, “Sunflowers” 1888 and “Sunflowers” 1889; both were splashed during the 2024 incident.