Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This revealing study considers the remarkable alliance between chemistry and art from the late eighteenth century to the period immediately following the Second World War. Synthetic Worlds offers fascinating new insights into the place of the material object and the significance of the natural, the organic, and the inorganic in Western aesthetics.

Esther Leslie considers how radical innovations in chemistry confounded earlier alchemical and Romantic philosophies of science and nature while profoundly influencing the theories that developed in their wake. She also explores how advances in chemical engineering provided visual artists with new colors, surfaces, coatings, and textures, thus dramatically recasting the way painters approached their work. Ranging from Goethe to Hegel, Blake to the Bauhaus, Synthetic Worlds ultimately considers the astonishing affinities between chemistry and aesthetics more generally. As in science, progress in the arts is always assured, because the impulse to discover is as immutable and timeless as the drive to create.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• introduction: Glints, Facets and Essence
• one Substance and Philosophy, Coal and Poetry
• two Eyelike Blots and Synthetic Colour
• three Shimmer and Shine, Waste and Effort in the Exchange Economy
• four Twinkle and Extra-terrestriality: A Utopian Interlude
• five Class Struggle in Colour
• six Nazi Rainbows
• seven Abstraction and Extraction in the Third Reich
• eight After Germany: Pollutants, Aura and Colours That Glow
• conclusion: Nature's Beautiful Corpse
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Leslie's astonishing volume is at once eclectic and subversive, a pastiche of principles and practices laced into the lives and times that defined some of the most interesting and important chemical discoveries and inventions. The focus is mostly German dyes and drugs and their impact on the 19th and 20th centuries. Although there is poetry and music in Leslie's synthesis, scientists may find the language arcane, often beguiling, uneven, and awkward. Others will enjoy the intellectual style of her tour de force. But will the audience ever be mixed? Will those who read Shakespeare and listen to Mozart find the universality of her message in learning about Perkin and Baeyer, about BASF and DuPont? This reviewer applauds her effort but fears the separate messages are not easily reconciled. The stretching of ideas across social, political, and cultural boundaries makes for exciting reading, but who will be her readers? Perhaps her composition is too academic. Still, give it a try. Prove this reviewer too conservative in asking for something a bit more journalistic. The introduction, followed by eight cleverly conceived chapters and a concluding statement, serves as an executive summary; enjoy the artwork and the extraordinary quality of the publisher's efforts. Try it! Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through professionals. L. W. Fine Columbia University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Esther Leslie is lecturer in English and humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism and Hollywood Flatlands: Critical Theory, Animation and the Avant-garde .