A groundbreaking reassessment that foregrounds Van Gogh’s profound engagement with the industrial age while making his work newly relevant for our world today 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.

A new look at the ways van Gogh represented the seasons and the natural world throughout his career The changing seasons captivated Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), who saw in their unending cycle the majesty of nature and the existence of a higher force. Van Gogh and the Seasons is the first book to explore this central aspect of van Gogh's life and work. Van Gogh often linked the seasons to rural life and labor as men and women worked the land throughout the year. From his depictions of peasants and sowers to winter gardens, riverbanks, orchards, and harvests, he painted scenes that richly evoke the sensory pleasures and deprivations particular to each season. This stunning book brings to life the locales that defined his tumultuous career, from Arles, where he experienced his most crucial period of creativity, to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he committed suicide. It looks at van Gogh's interpretation of nature, the religious implications of the seasons in his time, and how his art was perceived against the backdrop of various symbolist factions, antimaterialist debates, and esoteric beliefs in fin de siècle Paris. The book also features revealing extracts from the artist's correspondence and artworks from his own collection that provide essential context to the themes in his work. Breathtakingly illustrated and featuring informative essays by Sjraar van Heugten, Joan Greer, and Ted Gott, Van Gogh and the Seasons shines new light on the extraordinary creative vision of one of the world's most beloved artists.

Co-published by Museum of Modern Art and the Van Gogh Museum in conjunction with the first exhibition to focus on Vincent van Gogh's depictions of nocturnal and twilight scenes, Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night examines the artist's night landscapes, interior scenes, and representations of the effects of both gaslight and natural light on their surroundings. It features over one hundred illustrations, including details of Van Gogh's iconic paintings and works by other artist important to the development of his style.

Vincent van Gogh believed that one had to learn to read, just as one had to learn to see and learn to live. Van Gogh conveyed a message in his work about the path that he himself followed that was "more true to life," the path that human beings walk in their turbulent existence, the pilgrimage along the various stages of the road of life. He does not speak about the meaning of life but about the true art of living. It is fascinating to see and read the moving way in which he wrestled with the deep human questions of the whence, why, and whither of life. He did not see himself doing this on his own but acknowledged kindred spirits and allies in preachers, preacher-poets, painters, writers, and other artists who also attempted to find their own way through life in a similar fashion.Van Gogh was aware, like no other, of his duty and task in life: his vocation as human being and artist. That means that he was well acquainted with loneliness, fear, and despair, including suicidal tendencies. Nevertheless, he understood himself as cut out for faith, rather than resignation. Human beings follow their life's path, through storms and dangers, on land and on sea, where the "star of the sea" (the Virgin Mary) helps them and provides light. Van Gogh rejected the unhealthy, sickly forms of religion, electing instead to embrace authentic forms of piety.

A tantalizing, droll study of the idiosyncratic existence of the very rich, through the unexpected lens of the naturalist. Journalist Richard Conniff probes the age-old question "Are the rich different from you and me?" and finds that they are indeed a completely different animal. He observes with great humor this socially unique species, revealing their strategies for ensuring dominance and submission, their flourishes of display behavior, the intricate dynamics of their pecking order, as well as their unorthodox mating practices. Through comparisons to other equally exotic animals, Conniff uncovers surprising commonalities.

A carefully selected edition of the letters of Van Gogh. For this great artist it is unusually difficult to separate his life from his work. These letters reveal his inner turmoil and strength of character, and provide an extraordinary insight into the intensity and creativity of his artistic life.

The idea of desacralization has become almost commonplace, attributing to the word the rejection of what is sacred. One might think that it is strictly connected to theology and its system, or suppose that it implies the relationship human beings have with anything that can express a denial of the spiritual part of life. The concept of desacralization has numerous meanings, either from a philosophical or a literary viewpoint. The scholars' investigation of Dynamics of Desacralization has made this collection of essays rich and varied, revealing new worlds the different authors have created. What they do is to narrate various types of desacralization interrogating the nature of novels, poems or works of art; certain aspects of being are revealed through various expressions, engaging the multiple levels and the meaning of desacralization providing an articulation and interpretation of it.

Soon after his death, Vincent van Gogh’s reputation grew and developed through the extraordinary symbiosis evident between his paintings and letters. However it is a formidable task to read and analyze Van Gogh's nearly eight hundred letters due to the sheer bulk and complexity of the collection. Reading Vincent van Gogh is at once an interpretive guide to the letters and a distillation of Van Gogh’s key themes and ideas. This indispensable, synoptic, and interpretive view of the letters as a whole will be equally of interest to scholars and teachers making use of Van Gogh’s letters as it will be to those who have long been fascinated by the artist. This is the third book by Patrick Grant on the letters of Vincent van Gogh. It builds on his previous work in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (2014), a practical-critical study, and “My Own Portrait in Writing” (2015), a literary theoretical analysis that draws on the domain of modern literary studies. In the hands of Patrick Grant, the extraordinary literary achievements of Vincent van Gogh are explained and exemplified and claims that the well-known artist was also a great writer are confirmed.

Explore the depth of this brilliant and tortured artist's spirituality and find a new Van Gogh--philosopher of life, unorthodox theologian, and determined seeker of global spirituality.