Kirkus Starred Review – August 15, 2006
Hampl, Patricia - BLUE ARABESQUE: A Search for the Sublime
Harcourt (224 pp.) $22.00, Nov. 1, 2006 ISBN: 0-15-101506-6

Charmed in youth by a Matisse at the Art Institute of Chicago, a memoirist (I Could Tell You Stories, 1999, etc.) later pursues the painter’s story and discovers more of her own. Hampl, poet and professor (English/Univ. of Minnesota), has crafted an emotional memoir that begins in 1972, when she first saw the painting, Woman Before an Aquarium. She acknowledges that at the time, she had very little knowledge of the artist or of painting. (She amuses with some sentences about her elementary-school art-class clumsiness.) But something about the serenity of the painting caught her eye, and, later, her imagination; before long, her curiosity was leading her through worlds her blindness had hidden from her. She views the artist’s work in museums around the world; she visits the sites where he lived; on the Riviera, she talks to an ancient nun who knew him at the end of his life.

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