Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan (Arabic: إيتيل عدنان; 24 February 1925 – 14 November 2021) was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

In addition to her literary output, Adnan made visual works in a variety of media, such as oil paintings, films and tapestries, which have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the world.

Life

Etel N. Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon. Adnan's mother, Rose "Lily" Lacorte, was Greek Orthodox from Smyrna and her father, Assaf Kadri, was a Sunni Muslim-Turkish, and a high-ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus, Ottoman Syria.

Assaf Kadri's mother was Albanian. Adnan's grandfather was a Turkish soldier. Her father came from a wealthy family. He was a top officer and former classmate of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at the military academy. In contrast, Adnan's mother was raised in extreme poverty; her parents met in Smyrna during World War I while her father was serving as an officer in Smyrna. Prior to marrying Adnan's mother, her father was already married with three children. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Adnan's parents migrated to Beirut. Adnan stated that her mother was 16 years old when she met her father, at a time when "the Greeks in Turkey were in concentration camps."

Though she grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a primarily Arabic-speaking society, she was educated at French convent schools and French became the language in which her early work was first written. She also studied English in her youth, and most of her later work was first written in this language.

At 24, Adnan traveled to Paris where she received a degree in philosophy from the University of Paris. She then traveled to the United States where she continued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University. From 1958 to 1972, she was a professor of the philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael. She also lectured at many universities throughout the United States.

Adnan returned from the US to Lebanon and worked as a journalist and cultural editor for Al Safa newspaper, a French-language newspaper in Beirut. In addition, she also helped build the cultural section of the newspaper, occasionally contributing cartoons and illustrations. Her tenure at Al Safa was most notable for her front-page editorials, commenting on the important political issues of the day.

In her later years, Adnan began to openly identify as lesbian. She met her partner Simone Fattal in 1972 and the couple lived together until Adnan's death. The two of them worked together on The Post-Apollo Press which was founded by Fattal in 1982, and where Adnan was a vital contributor as an author and translator.

Adnan lived in Paris and Sausalito, California. She died in Paris on 14 November 2021, at the age of 96.

A documentary about Adnan's life by American filmmaker Marie Valentine Regan in collaboration with the artist, about "the last five years of her life", finished production in 2025.

Visual art

Adnan also worked as a painter, her earliest abstract works were created using a palette knife to apply oil paint onto the canvas – often directly from the tube – in firm swipes across the picture's surface. The focus of the compositions often being a red square, she was interested in the "immediate beauty of colour". Adnan cited Paul Klee as an important early influence. Both artists were interested in making visual art in small formats, and utilising a range of media and expressive forms. Of Klee, she said, "'Klee belongs to the lineage of geniuses for whom a single designation, whether "painter", "musician" or "architect", is too narrow. Every painting by Klee is like an act of discovery, achieved through a process of exploration, like a boat in the ocean." In 2012, a series of the artist's brightly colored abstract paintings were exhibited as a part of documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany.

In the 1960s, she began integrating Arabic calligraphy into her artworks and her books, such as Livres d'Artistes [Artist's Books]. She recalls sitting for hours copying words from an Arabic grammar without trying to understand the meaning of the words. Her art was very much influenced by early hurufiyya artists, including Iraqi artist Jawad Salim, Palestinian writer and artist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Iraqi painter Shakir Hassan al Said, who rejected Western aesthetics and embraced a new art form which was both modern and yet referenced traditional culture, media and techniques.

Inspired by Japanese leporellos, Adnan also painted landscapes on foldable screens that can be "extended in space like free-standing drawings".

In 2014, a collection of the artist's paintings and tapestries were exhibited as a part of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Adnan's retrospective at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, titled Etel Adnan In All Her Dimensions and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, featured eleven dimensions of Adnan's practice. It included her early works, her literature, her carpets, and others. The show was launched in March 2014, accompanied by a 580-page catalog of her work published jointly by Mathaf and Skira. The catalog was designed by artist Ala Younis in Arabic and English, and included text contributions by Simone Fattal, Daniel Birnbaum, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, as well as six interviews with Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

In 2015, Adnan's paintings and tapestries were featured in Sharjah Biennial 12: The past, the present, the possible alongside works by Chung Chang Sup, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara, and Saloua Raouda Choucair as well as contemporary artists such as Julie Mehretu, Haegue Yang, Taro Shinoda, Jac Leirner, and Adrian Villar Rojas, among others.

In 2017, Adnan's work was included in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, a group exhibition organized by MoMA, which brought together prominent artists including Ruth Asawa, Gertrudes Altschul, Anni Albers, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape, among others.

In 2018, MASS MoCA hosted a retrospective of the artist, titled A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun, including a selection of paintings in oil and ink, as well as a reading room of her written works. The exhibition explored how the experience of reading poetry differs from the experience of looking at a painting.

Published in 2018, Etel Adnan, a biography of the artist written by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, inquires into the artist's work as a shaman and activist. In 2020, the Griffin Poetry Prize was awarded to her book Time.

Adnan's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Writing

In English

In Arabic

• al-Sitt Mari Ruz: riwayah. (Sitt Marie Rose.), with Jirum Shahin and Firyal Jabburi Ghazul. Al-Qahirah: al-Hayah al-Ammah li-Qusur al-Thaqafah, 2000.
• n mudun wa-nisa: rasail il Fawwaz. (Of Cities and Women.) Bayrut: Dar al-Hihar, 1998.
• Kitab al-bahr; kitab al-layal; kitab al-mawt; kitab al-nihayah, with Abid Azarih. Bayrut: Dar Amwaj, 1994.
• al-Sitt Marie Ruz. Bayrut: al-Mu-assasah al-Arabiyah lil-Dirasat wa-al-Nashr, 1979.

In French

Exhibitions

Etel Adnan's works can be found in many collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Mathaf, Doha, Qatar, Royal Jordanian Museum, Tunis Modern Art Museum, Sursock Museum, Beirut, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, British Museum, London, M+, and Hong Kong.