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Columbus Dispatch – December 27, 2006 -- Tale
follows poet’s chase of Matisse -- By Margaret Quamme --
Blue Arabesque by Patricia Hampl, Harcourt, $22 -- Blue Arabesque
will probably be placed on memoir shelves in bookstores. But it
won’t fit comfortably there — or anywhere else. This pleasingly
compact book is part autobiography, part art history, part
philosophy, part biography, part literary critique and part
travelogue. In essence, it’s a long personal essay of the sort that
has almost died out: one in which the reader gets to watch the
writer’s mind at work, with all its quirky detours onto unfamiliar
bypaths. The volume takes off from Patricia Hampl’s 1972 encounter
with Matisse’s Woman Before an Aquarium. Just out of college, "an
English major on the loose at last," Hampl was late for a lunch date
in the cafeteria of the Chicago Art Institute when she found herself
blindsided by Matisse’s painting, "hammered by the image" and...
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Chicago Tribune – December 24, 2006 -- Patricia
Hampl's paean to art and the art of contemplation -- By Donna
Seaman -- Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime By Patricia Hampl,
Harcourt, 215 pages, $22 -- Audacious originality is an essential
ingredient in the modern myth of the artist as hero. But even the
most radical creations, alarming or disconcerting works that embody
what critic Robert Hughes has termed "the shock of the new," are
rooted in artistic tradition. Art begets art, art elicits art and
art sustains art as artists immerse themselves in art of the past,
then endeavor to refute, subvert, or refresh convention. And
painters are nourished by music. Painters read poetry to sharpen
their perceptions. Writers study paintings and sculpture with
avidity. Close scrutiny of a work...
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| The New York Times has selected BLUE ARABESQUE
by Patricia Hampl as one of the 100 most notable books of 2006
-- December 2006 |
Baltimore Sun – November 12, 2006 -- An esthetic
sense set free by Matisse --by BERNARD COOPER
Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime by Patricia Hampl, Harcourt
/ 216 pages / $22 -- In 1972, while rushing through the Art
Institute of Chicago to meet a friend in the cafeteria, Patricia
Hampl was stopped in her tracks by Henri Matisse's Femme et poissons
rouges (or, as it's known in English, Woman Before an Aquarium).
Until then, the young literature student considered herself
singularly unqualified to make or even look at paintings. Her early
attempts at drawing were so abysmal that her elementary school nuns
gave her lettering assignments during art period. She'd never taken
an art history class. Unable to "lure images from eye to hand to
paper," she'd grown up thinking that her skills and sensitivities
were exclusively verbal, the world of visual art beyond her grasp...
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America – The National Catholic Weekly – November
6, 2006
Immersed in Leisure -- This memoir begins with Patricia Hampl’s
accidental viewing of the Matisse painting “Woman Before an
Aquarium,” which waylaid her on her way to the cafeteria of the
Chicago Art Institute to meet a friend some 34 years ago. She stood
transfixed, absorbing the portrait of a woman gazing at a goldfish
bowl before a blue Moroccan screen. The young writer felt deeply
drawn to this “madonna, but a modern one,” whose gaze seemed to
represent prophetically...
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Cleveland Plain Dealer -- Sunday, November 05,
2006 -- Hampl plunges into a fishbowl for deep human journey --
By Daniel Dyer -- Patricia Hampl is a seeker, a restless and
determined one. Her latest work explores her 30-year obsession with
"Woman Before an Aquarium," the Henri Matisse painting of a seated
woman staring at a small fishbowl resting before her on a table.
Beginning with her earliest publications in the 1970s, Hampl has
heeded the urgent promptings of her curiosity. Indeed, 20 years ago
she identified "avidity" as the central capacity of the human mind.
In her case, there is little doubt...
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The New York Times Book Review -- October 29, 2006
Hammered by Art -- By KATHRYN HARRISON -- Whether trained on the
Gospels, the Kama Sutra, the Book of Mormon or even Martha Stewart
Living, Patricia Hampl's eye would remain thoroughly and indelibly
catechized. “Blue Arabesque” is either the heady confession of an
aesthete, or a critical examination of art and literature as
vehicles for a (if not the) holy ghost. Possibly, Hampl would draw
no distinction between the two. The author’s earlier memoirs, “A
Romantic Education” and “Virgin Time,” have prepared her readers for
her arrival at this point in the...
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Time Out New York – November 2, 2006 -- Blue
Arabesque by Patricia Hampl. Harcourt, $22. -- The first paragraph
of Patricia Hampl’s compact memoir Blue Arabesque suggests a story
inspired by impression and ambiance rather than chronology.
Beginning on a spring day in 1972—“best I can remember,” Hampl
quickly slips in, focusing on mood more than meticulous facts—the
book opens with the author’s charged memory of being “apprehended”
by Matisse’s Woman Before an Aquarium at the Chicago Art Institute.
Not an art enthusiast at the time...
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Entertainment Weekly (EW Pick, A-) -- October 27, 2006
-- By Jennifer Reese -- In this sinuous meditation on artistic
inspiration, poet Hampl revisits the figures who have meant the most
to her, including Henri Matisse, Katherine Mansfield, and eccentric
Minnesota-born filmmaker Jerome Hill, all of whom, like Hampl, were
drawn "as if by divining rod...to the aquamarine rim of the
Mediterranean." In just over 200 pages of honed prose, she segues...
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Los Angeles Times – October 22, 2006 -- Sight
specific -- Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, Patricia
Hampl, Harcourt: 216 pp. $22 -- By Bernard Cooper -- In 1972, while
rushing through the Art Institute of Chicago to meet a friend in the
cafeteria, Patricia Hampl was stopped in her tracks by Henri
Matisse's "Femme et poissons rouges" (or, as it's known in English,
"Woman Before an Aquarium"). Until then, the young literature
student considered herself singularly unqualified to make or even
look at paintings. Her early attempts at drawing were so abysmal
that her elementary school nuns gave...
Read more...
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Booklist Starred Boxed Review – September 15, 2006
-- Hampl, Patricia - BLUE ARABESQUE: A Search for the Sublime --
Hampl’s memoirs of discovery are exhilarating. Writing of both
earthly pilgrimages and the inner journeys they provoke, she brings
a poet’s love of language, fluency in patterns and modulations, and
fascination with the life of the mind to unusual aesthetic,
spiritual, and cultural inquiries. Her most sensuous, sinuous, and
radiant book to date arcs from contemplation of a painting by
Matisse. Woman before an Aquarium has served as icon and lodestar
for Hampl ever since she was first “apprehended” by it in Chicago in
1972. Matisse’s arresting image of...
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Publishers Weekly Starred Review – September 11,
2006 -- Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime -- In this
discursive and absorbing interdisciplinary work, Hampl (A Romantic
Education) explores the artistic life from an impressively diverse
number of perspectives. Her starting place is Matisse’s Woman Before
an Aquarium, a painting that, to her, represents the languid,
inwardlooking life of the mind that leads to great art. From this
image, Hampl sets off on an intellectual journey that leads her from
Matisse’s odalisques to those of Delacroix and Ingres, then outward
to the larger notions of orientalism...
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Library Journal – September 1, 2006 -- Hampl, Patricia - BLUE ARABESQUE: A Search for the Sublime
-- In
this personal essay, Hampl (A Romantic Education) explains that, as an
English major, her career goal was to be left alone to read an endless novel
while observing and musing about the world. After graduation, en route to
meet a friend for lunch in an art museum cafeteria, Hampl saw the Henri
Matisse painting Woman Before an Aquarium, which depicts an aloof woman
gazing at a goldfish...
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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...
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