Blue Arabesque

As a recent college graduate, Patricia Hampl stood before a Matisse canvas at the Art Institute of Chicago and could not look away. It shows a remote woman watching goldfish in a bowl, with a patterned Moroccan screen rising behind her. To Hampl, the figure seemed a secular cousin of the nuns she had known as a girl: unbound, self-possessed, and beyond reach, an emblem of the feminism that would follow.

This book follows the pull of that woman, someone who seems to drift in idleness while the modern world speeds up around her. Hampl's wandering meditation carries readers to the Riviera and North Africa, moving from the convent to the harem. Along the way she considers Eugène Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Katherine Mansfield, always circling back to Matisse and the many languid women he painted again and again.

Hampl comes to see those canvases as far more than ornamental luxuries. She reads them as unexpected acts of personal integrity, and her prose takes on the restless vitality Matisse himself pursued in his work.