Abstract
Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was a Lebanese-American visual artist, poet and writer whose career spanned multiple continents, languages, and artistic mediums. Born in Beirut, she studied philosophy in Paris and the United States and began painting in California at age 34. Her multidisciplinary practice eventually included oil paintings, wall ceramics, tapestries, and leporellos (accordion-fold books) that combined Arabic calligraphy with poetry. Adnan’s literary works—notably the novel Sitt Marie-Rose and the book of 59 poems, The Arab Apocalypse—address the Lebanese Civil War and geopolitical conflicts, and were written following her move to the United States. She often collaborated with theatre practitioners and contemporary musicians. In her later years, Adnan explored themes of landscape and nature, especially the Bay Area landmark Mount Tamalpais, along with the cosmos and the human condition.
Biography
Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American painter, visual artist, poet and writer. She was born and raised in Beirut, the only child of a Greek mother from Izmir (who left the city in 1922, at the end of the Greek occupation) and an Arab Ottoman officer from Damascus, who retired to Beirut after the Ottoman Army’s defeat in the First World War. She spoke Turkish with her parents at home; French at school; and Arabic with her friends. Her life unfolded across languages, cities and continents: Beirut, the city where she was born, left, returned to and left again; Izmir, which she never saw but imagined through her mother’s stories; Damascus, a city where she frequently travelled with her father to visit relatives; Paris, where she pursued her higher education and spent her final years; and the San Francisco Bay Area, where she made her home in the fishing village of Sausalito. She travelled between these places—Asia Minor to Europe to America and back to Europe—that were, in her own words, different ‘exiles’.
Her fascination with poetry began with sentences she constructed from words her French teacher gave her and continued through reading the French poets. Although her father worked odd jobs after his retirement from the army, the family struggled financially. When she began taking on small office jobs in Lebanon for the French Mandate authorities, her acquaintance with colonialism became direct and unmediated. Her father died in 1947 and two years later, in 1949, Adnan set off on her first exile to Paris—a city she knew from poetry—with a scholarship to pursue her higher education at the Sorbonne. By then, Algeria’s struggle for independence from France had begun. Adnan grew increasingly averse to using the French language that had shaped her intellectual development, prompting her second period of exile, to the United States, where she moved in 1955 to pursue a PhD in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1956, she paused her studies and travelled to Mexico. In 1957, she transferred to Harvard to continue her doctorate, abandoning her academic studies a year later. That same year her mother died, leaving her with no family in Beirut.
First period in California
In 1958, Adnan began teaching philosophy at Dominican College in San Rafael (now Dominican University of California). She was 34 when she first began to paint, a year after beginning her teaching career. When the head of department, Ann O’Hanlon (1908–1998), asked to see her portfolio, she admitted she had never painted before, commenting that her mother had told her she was unskilled. Starting in the 1960s, she began to exhibit her paintings at art centres and galleries around San Francisco. After meeting with Rick Barton, a Vietnam veteran and Bay Area artist, at a café in 1963, the accordion-book-style leporellos he created became central to her artistic journey. In her first leporellos, Adnan, who learned Arabic ‘on the street’, began writing in the calligraphy of this language—which she could not use to compose poetry—appropriating quotations from Arab poets. The first of these books, created with ink and brush, featured poems by Iraqi poet Badr Shaker al-Sayyeb (1926–1964), who had just died prematurely. Other leporellos followed, featuring the poetry of Yusuf al-Khal (1917–1987), Adonis (1930–), Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) and Georges Schéhadé (1905–1989) among others. Later, Western poets joined them, but the visual dimension of Arabic calligraphy remained a constant focus in her life. Much later, Adnan’s attention to the creative connection between handwriting, and drawing was the impetus for an exhibition held at the Pompidou Metz Museum in 2021, which besides her work also featured material from many other artists and writers, including Victor Hugo, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Pierre Alechinski and Louise Bourgeois.
Although she never ceased painting, Adnan began to add various techniques and media to her artistic repertoire from the mid-1960s. She began attending the workshops of Bay Area weaver Ida Grae, and started to create original carpet designs after travelling to Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt in 1966. These sketches laid in drawers for decades, causing Adnan to remark late in life that ‘Music, like tapestry, exists only through intermediaries!’ Invited to exhibit at dOCUMENTA13 in 2012, she chose to have her designs woven into carpets at the Pinton workshop in Aubusson, long considered the centre of tapestry weaving in France. Later, she began creating ceramic murals for public spaces so people who could not see her paintings in person could still experience them: two are held by Qatar University (QM) and one by LaM (Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut). Similarly, the 8mm films she shot in New York in the 1960s picture the loneliness of humans squeezed between high-rises, with the city seemingly deserted, yet ceaselessly in motion. From the mid-2010s, she also produced engravings. With regards to the need for relying on craftspeople to print her etchings, she wrote: ‘…knowing that these engravings require collaboration brings me … out of the solitude associated with painting.’
