Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime

Patricia Hampl's meditation on the odalisque opens with her discovery of a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: 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 the modern era, transporting us to the Cote d'Azur and across to North Africa, from cloister to harem. We encounter writers and artists as diverse as Eugene 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.