Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was a renowned Lebanese American poet, essayist, and visual artist known for her distinctive abstract visual language, full of colour and emotions. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925 to a Greek mother and a Syrian father, Adnan grew up in a multicultural environment, speaking multiple languages including Arabic, French and Greek. She studied philosophy both at the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of California, Berkeley.

Adnan led a somewhat nomadic existence. From 1958 to 1972, she held a professorial position at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael and lectured at other universities across the United States. Adnan eventually settled in Sausalito, California, while making regular trips to France, Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Tunisia. However, it was her paintings, she believed, to be her only true home.

Adnan was inspired by Arabic art, calligraphy and poetry, but also by the works of artists such as Paul Cezanne, Nicolas de Staël, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Agnes Martin. Her paintings, too, are caught between worlds. While they represent deep and enduring expressions of place, they also capture the sensation of imagining it from afar. They are pictures of how landscape lives in the mind: bright, abstract and never still.

Adnan’s work spans several mediums, reflecting her diverse cultural background and intellectual pursuits. As an artist, she is celebrated for her abstract landscapes, often featuring the recurring motif of Mount Tamalpais in California or the coastal light of her childhood in Beirut. Adnan sought to communicate with nature through her art. Her bold use of colour, applied broad, flat strokes, creates a unique form of expression through the intensity of tones and hues.

Etel Adnan’s four-decade-long partnership with the sculptor and artist Simone Fattal was significant both personally and professionally. The couple collaborated on various artistic projects, including The Post-Apollo Press, a publication founded by Fattal in 1982 with a focus on experimental works of poetry, prose and translation.

Adnan’s achievements in the visual arts were widely recognised. She participated in the Whitney Biennial and Documenta 13. In 2021, following her death at the age of 96, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented a major retrospective titled Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure. Her works also belong in the collections of major museums across the world, including the British Museum, M+ in Hong Kong, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Sharjah Art Museum and more.