University and an MA and PhD in History of Art from Yale University. He is the author of Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (2002) and James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics and History in the 1960s (2009). His third book, John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration, was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art.
Lobel applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature, and reported the following:
Much of page 99 of Van Gogh and the End of Nature is taken up by a large-scale reproduction of a single work of art: a painting entitled Gauguin’s Chair, which Vincent van Gogh created in the autumn of 1888. The picture, rendered largely in tones of green, purple, and reddish-brown, depicts an elaborate wooden chair; on its seat are perched a lit candle and a couple of books, perhaps popular novels of the day. The long span of green wall at back is punctuated by a gas wall sconce. The several lines of text on the page read as follows:Learn more about Van Gogh and the End of Nature at the Yale University Press website.And to Theo, whom he was constantly hitting up for funds, [Vincent] argued that the expense would pay for itself, since it would give the two artists that much more time to make paintings: “If Gauguin and I work every evening for a fortnight, won’t we earn it all back again?” This is why classifying this span of months as Van Gogh’s gaslight period makes so much sense. It touches on pictorial, practical, personal, and professional matters, all rolled into one.As it turns out, someone who opened the text to page 99 would get a good sense of the book, for a number of reasons. For one, the large-scale, full color reproduction of a painting signals to the reader the importance of images, and close visual analysis, to the project as a whole. Additionally, even though the page includes just a few lines of text, that passage highlights one of the main takeaways in this particular chapter: that gaslight was a central preoccupation for Van Gogh, particularly during his time in Arles, in the south of France. And this then dovetails with one of the broader aims of the book, which is to connect Van Gogh and his artistic preoccupations to the industrial era in which he lived and worked (gaslight was powered by coal gas, hence underscoring the artist’s involvement in the burgeoning age of fossil fuels). While Van Gogh’s depictions of the natural world have tended to shape how we think about him, Van Gogh and the End of Nature shows that a closer look reveals how industry and pollution were present in his world, and in his work, in many different and varied ways.
--Marshal Zeringue
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