Albert & the Whale

(Hardback)

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A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
AN OBSERVER BEST ART BOOK OF 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022

This is a wonderful book. A lyrical journey into the natural and unnatural world Patti Smith
Everything Philip Hoare writes is bewitching Olivia Laing

An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan.

Albrecht Drer 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.

InAlbert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Drer'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 Drer'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 Whaleoffersglorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.

Reviews

Praise for Albert and the Whale

Always original Always pushing from somewhere new Olivia Laing

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 Campell-Johnston

Magnificent new book Hoares feeling for Drer 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' Literary Review

Philip Hoare, best know 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 Michael Prodger, Sunday Times

Visionary: a tone poem put together from the lives of others, with detailed use of archives Financial Times

Mr Hoares portrait glitters with arresting details His readings of Drers work grow woozy with enthusiasm, dissolving into a kind of modernist poetry. Readers who prefer their art history to have both feet on the ground might be unmoored; others will be intoxicated Economist

Its a summary-defying blend of art history, biography, nature writing and memoir you can feel the delight he takes in being unbound by anything but his enthusiasms. He is alternately precise and concealing. His biographical sections are both elliptical and redolent of entire lives. His art criticism is often stirring New York Times

Author Bio

Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wildes Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and Englands Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim. An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBCs Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.