Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World
(Pegasus, $29)
In 1520, the artist Albrecht Dürer traveled for several days to view a beached whale but arrived too late, said John Williams in The New York Times. By standard measures, this was a nonevent. Yet its centrality to Philip Hoare’s new book is “perfectly indicative of the strange, seemingly spare ingredients that Hoare likes to turn into feasts.” The British writer, known for his award-winning 2008 book, The Whale, here makes Dürer and his work the subject of a “summary-defying blend of art history, biography, nature writing, and memoir.” Whether you find his methods “enchanting or somewhat dizzying,” it’s hard not to be awed by “the forceful weather system that is Hoare’s imagination.”
Hoare positions Dürer as a central figure at a moment of revolution in human his
tory, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times (U.K.). “Here is an artist whose vision was forged in the medieval world, in the domain of myths, monsters, and miracles. At the same time, he was treading the very brink of the future, looking forward into the new realm of scientific revelations and discoveries.” Whales were near-mythic beasts, rarely seen. Dürer, whose engravings made him arguably the world’s first international artist, was spreading striking images—some accurate, some not—of the world’s wonders. But Hoare’s narrative does not dwell in 1520 for long. “It swirls times and places and people and disciplines together,” and “a picture of human society across history builds up.”
Hoare’s style takes getting used to, said Charles Arrowsmith in The Washington Post. A mention of a Dürer biographer inspires him to loop in other midcentury intellectuals who fled the U.S. That leads to mentions of poet Marianne Moore, novelist Thomas Mann, even David Bowie. “Before long, Hoare has unfurled a whole tapestry of lives connected, however loosely, to Dürer’s work and its themes.” From this idiosyncratic constellation of cultural greats, however, “he extrapolates an entire cosmology, a way of seeing the world every bit as rich and penetrating as Dürer’s.”