Synopsis
Just out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a Moroccan screen behind her. In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of this lounging woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the rush of the modern era. Hampl’s meditation takes us to the Cote d’Azur and to North Africa, from cloister to harem, pondering figures as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Returning always to Matisse’s portraits of languid women, she discovers they were not decorative indulgences but something much more. Moving with the life force that Matisse sought in his work, Blue Arabesque is Hampl’s dazzling and critically acclaimed tour de force.
The New York Times - Kathryn Harrison
Ultimately, Blue Arabesque isn t a memoir so much as it is a paean to the act of seeing, celebrating our capacity to be transformed by the truths art holds, recognizing them as . . . holy. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled, John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing. On Photography, by Susan Sontag, identifies a heroism of vision and finds everyday life apotheosized in image. Patricia Hampl s determination to occupy the space between the eye and its object and her success at articulating the mysterious transactions therein grants her authority among writers like Berger and Sontag, who not only sit and stare but see. Read Blue Arabesque and you too might mistake or exchange art museums for churches.