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

Vincent van Gogh: Celebrating nature’s beauty, or bearing witness to its demise?

Climate-concerned readers up on the news may recall recent examples of how climate change affected Van Gogh’s art: the infamous soup-slinging incidents of 2022 and 2024, when Just Stop Oil protesters threw tomato soup at “Sunflowers” (1888*), the beloved painting on display in London’s National Gallery.

The New York Times reported that the protesters chose the painting solely for its high profile: “It was simply ‘an iconic painting, by an iconic painter’ and an attack on it would generate headlines.”

For Michael Lobel, professor of art history at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, however, there are intrinsic connections between Van Gogh and climate change. 

Though he has often been dubbed “the quintessential painter of nature,” a deeper look at the full range of Van Gogh’s work reveals a more complex relationship with nature. Beyond simply recording its beauty, Lobel argues, Van Gogh’s work reflects direct experience with its demise in the form of industrialization across the European landscape. Acknowledging Bill McKibben’s 1989 book, “The End of Nature,” Lobel proposes that Van Gogh also understood that human impacts on the environment could be devastating, even when rendered beautifully.

“Van Gogh and the End of Nature” is an engaging blend of biography, criticism, and environmental history. Hearkening back to the physics of the ancient world, Lobel names his first four chapters after the elements – air, earth, fire, and water – thought to make up, in different combinations, all that one could see. In the final chapter, “Colors,” Lobel recounts how the new chemistry of fossil fuels created the brighter pigments Van Gogh used to depict his nature.

In the book’s first chapter, “Air,” Lobel shows how smokestacks pervade Van Gogh’s work. In the backgrounds of many paintings, plumes of black smoke stream from factories, gas works, homes, and locomotives. Depending on weather conditions, the dust, soot, and fumes he painted could become life-threatening. And Lobel suggests that Van Gogh experienced this directly; he was briefly stationed in London during one of its toxic fogs.

The coal burned to power machines and heat buildings had to be mined, resulting in the gashes that crisscrossed and the slag heaps that dotted Van Gogh’s landscapes. In “Earth,” Lobel surveys the artist’s many drawings and paintings of these scars. 

Lobel then turns, in “Fire,” to Van Gogh’s night scenes, among his most popular paintings. In his notebooks and letters, Van Gogh wrote passionately about painting at night. These passages inspired a memorable scene in “Lust for Life,” the 1956 film in which Kirk Douglas, playing Van Gogh, wears a straw hat festooned with candles while dabbing furiously at a dimly lit canvas. Lobel notes that Van Gogh relied, instead, on the light provided by gas-burning streetlights. 

A favorite night painting, “Starry Night Over Rhone,” gives Lobel entry to his fourth chapter, “Water.” The scene depicted is just below the point where the Roubine du Roi joins the Rhone. The Roubine du Roi, Lobel points out, often reeked from the raw sewage that flowed from houses into street drains and then into waterways. Fumes from volatile chemicals dumped into the river by factories lining its shores sometimes masked the organic odors while posing dangers of their own. 

But dangerous chemicals and metals, Lobel shows in his final chapter on “Colors,” were integral to Van Gogh’s art. Several of his signature paints – like Paris green, garancine red, and methyl violet – contained 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 paintings of that era in other ways. The brilliantly colored clothing that appears in many works from this period could only be made with chemically enhanced dyes. Then when dumped by the factories that made them or the mills that used them, these dyes may have colored the streams the artists painted – or so one contemporaneous critic, skeptical of the brilliant blues in Edouard Manet’s “Argenteuil,” speculated. 

Despite the fact that Manet and other artists of the era also addressed the impacts of industrialization, Lobel argues that Van Gogh is a special case. “His art was deeply engaged with, if not dependent on, modern industry and, more pointedly, industrial pollution, on which he regularly drew for the subjects, concerns, and even the very materials of his work.” 

The Just Stop Oil protesters were not wrong to single him out. 

Diane Tuft: Chronicling environmental change with photography

Fast forward to an artist from a very different era: Photographer Diane Tuft, who has witnessed the increasing effects of climate change in her own lifetime.

A specialist in aerial photography, Diane Tuft’s previous work includes “The Arctic Melt” (2017), in which she relied on the spectrum visible to the naked eye, and “Gondwana” (2012) and “Unseen” (2009) in which, with special films, she captured images at frequencies beyond human perception.

In the introduction to her new book, “Entropy,” Tuft draws a line back to her photographs of ice.

The word entropy aptly characterizes climate change’s effect on … water. As ice melts, molecules gain energy, spread further apart, and lose their crystalline structure. … As water further transforms into a gaseous state, this disarray intensifies. Water is its own thermodynamic system. … We are seeing the unpredictability of its effects … unfold in real time.

The 80 photographs included in “Entropy,” most taken as the artist flew over her chosen landscapes in helicopters, record how climate change has altered Earth’s surface through droughts, epic storms and floods, and rising sea levels.

The Great Salt Lake of Utah, shrinking as the rains have repeatedly failed and as humans have diverted to croplands the streams that once fed it, occupies a central place in the book. Indeed, a surreal image of the lake (“Journey’s End”) graces its cover – a geometric pattern imposed on a natural landscape by human actions.

But the consequences of these human actions are not just aesthetic. As biology professor Bonnie Baxter points out in her essay, one of two included in “Entropy,” the drying lake bed has become an increasingly dangerous health hazard. In the dust that regularly settles over the communities that surround the lake and then makes its way into the homes and lungs of their inhabitants, researchers have found arsenic, lead, lithium, mercury, and strontium. Thus, like Van Gogh’s works, many of Tuft’s photographs depict toxic landscapes.

But not all. Photographs of Bangladesh, the Chesapeake Bay, the Florida Keys, and the Pacific Ocean islands of Kiribati and Marshall fill many pages in this collection. In these images, it is the rising waters and raging storms that are altering the landscapes and reshaping their borders with the sea. 

These consistently striking images often seem more like paintings than photographs. Indeed, art curator Stacey Epstein sees in Diane Tuft’s work the influence of artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Richard Diebenkorn. But she also traces Tuft’s exquisite craftsmanship back to photographers like Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston. As a former bookseller familiar with their similarly oversized books, I also saw connections with aerial photographers such as Marilyn Bridges, J. Henry Fair, and Alex MacLean in Tuft’s work.

Diane Tuft’s “Entropy” is a smartly curated collection of photographs. Like the Van Gogh paintings viewed anew by Michael Lobel, the images are simultaneously beautiful and unnerving. Together, perhaps these two books can help us see what we are doing to the world while we can still make the choice to do otherwise.

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