The Creative and Intellectual Vision of Etel Adnan

Exhibition Reviews

November 12, 2021

Among the generation of early post-war female artists who gained international fame, Etel Adnan takes an important place in both the literary and visual arts domain. Throughout the decades, this now 96-year-old artist has produced an impressive body of work by using different media. Today, she is considered the most celebrated Arab American author writing today.

Her intellectual output left a lasting mark on the way the modern Arab world is interpreted and understood, while her art production suggests a myriad of influences mostly related to the development of early 20th-century abstraction.

To review six decades behind Adnan’s practice, Guggenheim decided to organize an all-encompassing exhibit titled Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure. Curated by Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Curator, Contemporary Art, and Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator, Collections, it will bring together a selection of paintings, tapestries, films, and works on paper.

Left: Etel Adnan - Untitled, 1983. Oil on canvas, 29 × 29 inches (73.7 × 73.7 cm) Private Collection / Right: Etel Adnan - Le poids du monde 11, 2016. Oil on canvas, 11 13/16 × 9 7/16 inches (30 × 24 cm) Collection of Ellen and Alan Meckler

The Becoming of Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925 in a multilingual environment, since her mother was Greek and her father was Syrian. As an adult, she has lived for extended periods in Lebanon, the United States, and France. In her mid-20s, Adnan went to Paris where she received a degree in philosophy from the University of Paris and then moved to the United States to continue studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University.

In the late 1950s, she started painting while working as a professor of philosophy in Northern California. To oppose France’s colonial rule in Algeria, Adnan stopped writing in French and declared that she would paint in Arabic. From 1952 to 1978, she taught philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California, and at a certain point of her career, the artist/writer returned to Lebanon and worked as a journalist and cultural editor for the newspaper Al-Safa, a French-language newspaper in Beirut. During that time, she enforced the cultural section of the newspaper, added cartoons, and illustrations, outstanding front-page editorials that addressed political issues of the day.

The artist’s essays and poetry focus mostly on the critical articulation of war and social issues, while her visual art is a more intimate interpretation of the human spirit and the beauty of the natural world.

Etel Adnan - Untitled, 1980s. Oil on canvas. Image: 7 1/8 × 9 7/8 inches (18.1 × 25.1 cm) frame: 9 1/8 inches (23.2 cm). Collection of Gary and Tracy Mezzatesta X.2021.26

The Works on View

The artist was majorly influenced by The Hurufiyya movement, especially the Iraqi artist Jawad Salim, Palestinian writer and artist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Iraqi painter Shakir Hassan al-Said, all of whom rejected Western aesthetics and developed a new art form which was based on both modern and traditional patterns.

Adnan initially used a palette knife to apply oil paint onto the canvas in swipes across the picture plane. However, in the 1960s, she started incorporating Arabic calligraphy into her artworks and her books, such as Livres d’Artistes (Artist's Books). Eventually inspired by Japanese leporellos, she also started producing landscapes on foldable screens.

The recurring motif in her painterly practice is Mount Tamalpais in Sausalito, a toponym she has been observing for decades from her California home. Despite being modest in form and scale, Adnan’s paintings and drawings are contemplative visualizations of the artist’s sensations.

The installment brings together a selection of works Adnan has made in the last 50 years including paintings, tapestries, and drawings. The visitors will also be able to experience a Super 8 motion-picture film, Motion (1980-89/2012), a contemplative visual essay made of the footage she captured during her travels in the 1980s and a selection of the artist’s leporellos: accordion-fold paper books that unravel her linguistic and visual domains. The works of Vasily Kandinsky, whom Adnan explored throughout her life will also be on display.

Left: Etel Adnan - Untitled, 1985. Oil on canvas, 30 × 29 inches (76.2 × 73.7 cm). Private Collection / Right: Etel Adnan - Untitled, 2018. Oil on canvas, 16 1/8 × 13 1/16 inches (40.9 × 33.2 cm), frame: 17 11/16 × 14 9/16 × 1 5/8 inches (45 × 37 × 4.2 cm). Courtesy the Artist and White Cube

Etel Adnan at The Guggenheim

Throughout the 2000s, the artworks of this unique artist/writer were presented in various places. These include the 2014 edition of the Whitney Biennial, that displayed the artist's paintings and tapestries, two important retrospectives at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha (Etel Adnan In All Her Dimensions, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist), and MASS MoCA in 2018 (A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun). An impressive biography of the artist written by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie was published in 2018.

The current retrospective aims to revisit Adnan’s practice one more time by giving new interpretations of specific aspects of her process, technique, and relation to her writing.

The exhibition Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure will be on view at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York until January 10th, 2022.

Featured image: Etel Adnan - Untitled, 2010. Oil on canvas, 9 7/16 × 11 13/16 inches (24 × 30 cm). Collection of Dana Farouki and Mazen Makarem

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