Just out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting she saw in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a mysterious Moroccan screen behind her.
Moving with the life force that Matisse sought in his work, Blue Arabesque is a dazzling tour de force..
Returning always to Matisse and his obsessive portraits of languid women, Hampl discovers they were not decorative indulgences but surprising acts of integrity.
Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield.
Her tantalizing meditation takes us to the Cote d\'Azur and North Africa, from cloister to harem, pondering figures as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, F.
In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of that woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the increasing rush of the modern era.
This woman seemed a welcome secular version of the nuns of Hampl\'s girlhood, free and untouchable, a poster girl for twentieth-century feminism.
Just out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting she saw in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a mysterious Moroccan screen behind her
