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.

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.

— Steven Poole, The Guardian

— Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday

— Ian Hunt, Art Monthly

— Modern Painters

— John Emsley, Times Higher Education Supplement

— Joseph Rykwert, Times Literary Supplement

— Agustí Nieto-Galan, Isis

— Choice

— Ambix