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Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime

Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime

by PatriciaHampl (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2006

    $15.85

  • New

    Paperback 2007

    $20.62
Synopsis

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. This woman seemed a welcome secular version of the nuns of Hampl's girlhood, free and untouchable, a poster girl for twentieth-century feminism. In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of that woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the increasing rush of the modern era. Her tantalizing meditation takes us to the Cote d'Azur and North Africa, from cloister to harem, pondering figures as diverse as Eug ne Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Returning always to Matisse and his obsessive portraits of languid women, Hampl discovers they were not decorative indulgences but surprising acts of integrity.

Moving with the life force that Matisse sought in his work, Blue Arabesque is a dazzling tour de force.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 224
 Edition: 1
 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
Published: Nov 2006
ISBN 10: 0151015066
ISBN 13: 9780151015061

Media Reviews
PRAISE FOR PATRICIA HAMPL

Patricia Hampl is passionate about the demands of memory . . . Hampl's voice is learned yet intimate, a gift of herself to the reader. --Maureen Howard, author of The Silver Screen

Patricia Hampl writes in the service of life in the very largest sense - writing that 'makes a path' from reality to the soul. --Marie Howe, author of What the Living Do


In her early poem Woman Before an Aquarium - yes, it's about the painting - Hampl writes: 'A mature woman always wants to be a mermaid.' Hampl achieves just such a metamorphosis here, swimming gracefully through the tricky currents of art and history, biography and memoir. Singing yet another beguiling verse of her career's lovely song. -- (11/05/2006)
Author Bio
PATRICIA HAMPL is the author of four memoirs--A Romantic Education, Virgin Time, I Could Tell You Stories, and Blue Arabesque--and two collections of poetry. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other awards. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.