“New York Times Notable Book 2006”

Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime
Harcourt
ISBN: 0151015066

This meditation on the odalisque figure in Western art opens with Patricia Hampl’s discovery, as a young woman, of a Matisse painting in the Chicago Art Institute: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a mysterious Moroccan screen behind her. Here was a poster girl for twentieth-century feminism, free and untouchable, a welcome secular version of the nuns of Hampl’s girlhood. Blue Arabesque explores the allure of that lounging figure so at odds with the increasing rush of modern life, transporting us to the Côte d’Azur and across to North Africa, from cloister to harem. We encounter writers and artists as diverse as Eugène Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield, all of them magnetized, as Matisse was, by the liquid light of the south of France. Returning always to Matisse’s obsessive portraits of languid women, Hampl is startled to realize that they were not mere decorative indulgences but something much more.

To hear a reading from Blue Arabesque at the Prairie Lights book store, click here.

continue to page 2 of 4