Michael Lobel – författare

A groundbreaking reassessment that foregrounds Van Gogh’s profound engagement with the industrial age while making his work newly relevant for our world today  “Van Gogh has never seemed more relevant. This stands as my favorite book of the year in any genre.”—John Vincler, Cultured  Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is most often portrayed as the consummate painter of nature whose work gained its strength from his direct encounters with the unspoiled landscape. 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—and how his art drew upon waste and pollution for its subjects and even for the very materials out of which it was made. 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.  Van Gogh and the End of Nature offers a radical revisioning of nearly the full span of the artist’s career, considering Van Gogh’s artistic process, his choice of materials, and some of his most beloved and iconic pictures. 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.

The American realist artist John Sloan (1871–1951) is best known for his portrayals of daily life in early 20th-century New York and as a member of The Eight and the Ashcan School, alongside peers like Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, and George Luks. Sloan’s artistic approach was shaped by his experience as a commercial illustrator, a type of work that inaugurated his professional career—at newspapers like the Philadelphia Press and later for mass-market magazines—and which he pursued even after he turned his focus to painting. In John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration, Michael Lobel explores the impact of Sloan’s illustrating on his wider output, including his paintings, his drawings for the radical journal The Masses, and his response to the watershed 1913 Armory Show. Illuminating the interaction between art and popular culture, this book provides an important new framework for understanding the modern genre of illustration, and in so doing touches on major 20th-century currents, including the rise and expansion of the mass media and the visual legacy of European modernism.