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Lot Essay
‘Painting is not a shape, but it is a feeling’ (Etel Adnan)
Never before seen in public, Still Life is rare early work that captures the emergence of Etel Adnan’s distinctive painterly language. Dating from the 1970s—a transformative decade in her practice—it demonstrates the luminous palette, rich textures and eloquent formal harmony that would become the hallmarks of her oeuvre. Originally a student of philosophy, Adnan took up painting while living and lecturing in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1958 and 1972. That year she returned to her native Beirut, where she met her life partner Simone Fattal and began to develop her practice alongside her work as a journalist. Still Life likely dates from these years, prior to her return to California in 1977. Quivering with echoes of Nicolas de Staël, Serge Poliakoff and Paul Klee—artists Adnan encountered during her student days in Paris—it sets the stage for the development of a practice finely attuned to the relationship between paint, form and feeling.
A writer and intellectual as much as painter, Adnan forged a visionary oeuvre that encompassed novels, poetry, journalism, criticism and plays as well as drawing, film and ceramics. Her paintings, which have garnered significant institutional recognition over the past decade, would come to represent one of the most vital strands of her output. Full of vibrant hues and quiet emotion, they capture the rich multi-media spirit of her wider practice. Her blocks of colour jostle and interlock with the same sense of poetic refinement she admired in Rimbaud, Baudelaire and others. Her rich, tactile surfaces are modelled with the pliancy of clay, imbuing her subjects with an almost three-dimensional presence. While the influence of European Modernism looms large, works such as the present also bear witness to her engagement with stained glass and tapestry during her initial years in California. It is a thrilling vision of an artistic language in the process of formation, and a potent sign of things to come.
Never before seen in public, Still Life is rare early work that captures the emergence of Etel Adnan’s distinctive painterly language. Dating from the 1970s—a transformative decade in her practice—it demonstrates the luminous palette, rich textures and eloquent formal harmony that would become the hallmarks of her oeuvre. Originally a student of philosophy, Adnan took up painting while living and lecturing in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1958 and 1972. That year she returned to her native Beirut, where she met her life partner Simone Fattal and began to develop her practice alongside her work as a journalist. Still Life likely dates from these years, prior to her return to California in 1977. Quivering with echoes of Nicolas de Staël, Serge Poliakoff and Paul Klee—artists Adnan encountered during her student days in Paris—it sets the stage for the development of a practice finely attuned to the relationship between paint, form and feeling.
A writer and intellectual as much as painter, Adnan forged a visionary oeuvre that encompassed novels, poetry, journalism, criticism and plays as well as drawing, film and ceramics. Her paintings, which have garnered significant institutional recognition over the past decade, would come to represent one of the most vital strands of her output. Full of vibrant hues and quiet emotion, they capture the rich multi-media spirit of her wider practice. Her blocks of colour jostle and interlock with the same sense of poetic refinement she admired in Rimbaud, Baudelaire and others. Her rich, tactile surfaces are modelled with the pliancy of clay, imbuing her subjects with an almost three-dimensional presence. While the influence of European Modernism looms large, works such as the present also bear witness to her engagement with stained glass and tapestry during her initial years in California. It is a thrilling vision of an artistic language in the process of formation, and a potent sign of things to come.