9781861892485, 1861892489, 9781861895547, and 1861895542
Description:
280 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm
Bibliographic Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Contents:
Introduction : Glints, facets and essence -- 1. Substance and philosophy: coal and poetry -- 2. Eyelike blots and synthetic colour -- 3. Shimmer and shine, waste and effort in the exchange economy -- 4. Twinkle and extra-terrestriality: a utopian interlude -- 5. Class struggle in colour -- 6. Nazi rainbows -- 7. Abstraction and extraction in the Third Reich -- 8. After Germany: pollutants, aura and colours that glow -- Conclusion : Nature's beautiful corpse
Summary:
"From the late eighteenth century to the period immediately following the Second World War, there was a remarkable alliance between chemistry and art. 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 during that era." and "Esther Leslie chronicles 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 in Germany and elsewhere provided visual artists with new colours, surfaces, coatings and textures, thus dramatically recasting the way painters approached their work. Ranging from Feuerbach to fluorescence, ultra-violet to utopia, Synthetic Worlds considers the startling affinities between chemistry, industry, aesthetics and art. 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."--Jacket