Albert and the Whale
Albrecht Dürer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse – the first works mass produced by any artist – to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly powerful and seductive, even now.
In ALBERT & THE WHALE, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Dürer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the power to save us?
With its wild and watery adventures, its witty accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world, ALBERT & THE WHALE offers glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.
ALBERT & THE WHALE was published on 4th March 2021 by Fourth Estate.
“In ALBERT & THE WHALE he leads his readers off on a marvellously varied, vividly imaginative, seductively digressive adventure that traces the path of another colossus…
this is a book to immerse you”
- The Times, Book of the Week, Rachel Campbell-Johnston
“Magnificent new book … Hoare’s feeling for Dürer exceeds anything I have ever read … his greatest work yet”
- Observer, Book of the Week, Laura Cumming
“Marvellous, unaccountable book. This is a book like the stomach of a whale: capaciously ready to accommodate whatever disparate stuff comes its way… Hoare’s modern encyclopedism also allows us to wallow in the book’s fluidity, the unpredictability of which disrupts everything, transmuting whatever is steeped in it into something rich and strange”
- Literary Review
“Philip Hoare, best known for Leviathan, his discursive and personal book about whales, has written a very Sebaldian new book. In it, he traverses his own patch and sniffs out an assortment of seemingly unrelated themes – Albrecht Durer, cetaceans, Thomas Mann and David Bowie, a deformation of the hand, the death of his mother – and proceeds to reveal the single degree of separation between them… Enlightening’”
- Sunday Times
“Visionary: a tone poem put together from the lives of others, with detailed use of archives”
- Financial Times
In ALBERT & THE WHALE, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Dürer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the power to save us?
With its wild and watery adventures, its witty accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world, ALBERT & THE WHALE offers glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.
ALBERT & THE WHALE was published on 4th March 2021 by Fourth Estate.
“In ALBERT & THE WHALE he leads his readers off on a marvellously varied, vividly imaginative, seductively digressive adventure that traces the path of another colossus…
this is a book to immerse you”
- The Times, Book of the Week, Rachel Campbell-Johnston
“Magnificent new book … Hoare’s feeling for Dürer exceeds anything I have ever read … his greatest work yet”
- Observer, Book of the Week, Laura Cumming
“Marvellous, unaccountable book. This is a book like the stomach of a whale: capaciously ready to accommodate whatever disparate stuff comes its way… Hoare’s modern encyclopedism also allows us to wallow in the book’s fluidity, the unpredictability of which disrupts everything, transmuting whatever is steeped in it into something rich and strange”
- Literary Review
“Philip Hoare, best known for Leviathan, his discursive and personal book about whales, has written a very Sebaldian new book. In it, he traverses his own patch and sniffs out an assortment of seemingly unrelated themes – Albrecht Durer, cetaceans, Thomas Mann and David Bowie, a deformation of the hand, the death of his mother – and proceeds to reveal the single degree of separation between them… Enlightening’”
- Sunday Times
“Visionary: a tone poem put together from the lives of others, with detailed use of archives”
- Financial Times
