Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan (; 24 February 1925 – 14 November 2021) was a Lebanese poet, essayist, novelist, and visual artist, and the author of Sitt Marie Rose. In 2003, the academic journal MELUS called her "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab author writing today".

In a 2021 obituary, ArtAsiaPacific wrote that Adnan was known in both literary and artistic circles and had become increasingly visible as a painter later in life; her work was exhibited internationally, including at documenta 13, the Whitney Biennial, and the Museum of Modern Art.

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 Muslim, and a high-ranking Ottoman officer from Damascus, Ottoman Syria, and whose mother was Albanian.

Adnan's father was a soldier who came from a wealthy family, she referred to him as an Arab in one interview, and as a Turk in another. He was a top officer and former classmate of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at the military academy.

Adnan grew up in Beirut in a multilingual environment. She spoke Greek and Arabic with her parents, and later recalled that she also spoke Turkish until about the age of five; French became her primary language after she enrolled in a French Lebanese Catholic school at that age. Although Arabic was part of her early linguistic environment, Adnan later said that she wrote in French and English rather than Arabic.

From 1945 to 1949, Adnan studied French literature at the École Supérieure des Lettres in Beirut, a predecessor to the later Saint Joseph University of Beirut's Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences. She then received a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne (then part of the University of Paris), where she earned a degree in philosophy. In 1955, she moved to the United States for postgraduate study in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College in San Rafael, California.

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 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.

Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Selected writings

Selected exhibitions The following is a selection of notable solo and group exhibitions.

2012: documenta 13, Kassel, Germany. 2014: Etel Adnan in All Her Dimensions, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar. 2014: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 2015: Sharjah Biennial 12: The Past, the Present, the Possible, Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates. 2016: The Weight of the World, Serpentine Galleries, London. 2017: Sea and Fog, Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada. 2018: New Work: Etel Adnan, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. 2019: Etel Adnan et les modernes, Mudam Luxembourg. 2019: Etel Adnan: Each day is a whole world, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado. 2020: The uprising of colors, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon. 2021: Etel Adnan: Light's New Measure, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 2022: Etel Adnan / Vincent van Gogh: Kleur als Taal, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Awards and recognition Etel Adnan in Paris in 2016 after receiving a lifetime achievement award. 1977: Awarded the France-Pays Arabes award for her novel Sitt Marie Rose. 2013: Her poetry collection Sea and Fog won the California Book Award for Poetry. 2013: Awarded the Lambda Literary Award. 2014: Named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. 2015: The Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, begun in 2015, is awarded annually by the University of Arkansas Press for "a first or second book of poetry, in English, by a writer of Arab heritage." 2020: The poetry collection Time, selections of Adnan's work translated from French by Sarah Riggs, wins the Griffin Poetry Prize. 2024: On 15 April 2024, Google celebrated her with a Google Doodle.