Words gradually became images for Lebanese artist Etel Adnan, considered one of the most important representatives of the Arab intellectual diaspora, and a pioneer of women’s rights. Her decades-long career spans writing and visual art, from poetry, novels, short stories and essays, to painting, film and tapestries. Born in 1925 in Beirut from a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, she grew up in a multicultural environment from childhood, speaking Greek and Turkish and stuying at French schools in a primarily Arabic-speaking country. At the age of 24, she moved to Paris to pursue a degree in philosophy at La Sorbonne, then travelling to the United States in 1955 for her graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael, and lectured at various other universities throughout the country. In 1972, Adnan moved back to Lebanon, where she worked as cultural editor for Al-Safa and L’Orient le Jour, both French-language newspapers in Beirut. At Al-Safa she helped to build the cultural section of the newspaper, occasionally contributing cartoons and illustrations, and wrote front-page editorials commenting on the important political issues of the day. She stayed in her native Lebanon until 1976.
In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, frequently travelling to Paris. In that same year, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris, and won the “France-Pays Arabes” award. Translated into more than ten languages, the book became a classic of War Literature. In the late 1970s, she also wrote texts for two documentaries made by Jocelyne Saab on the civil war in Lebanon, which were shown on French television as well as in other countries in Europe and Japan.
Until only a few years ago, she was mostly known for her writing, but her contribution to Documenta 13 in 2012 brought her art to international attention, reassessing her as an important figure in the art world. Adnan’s first paintings date from 1958, the year she moved to San Francisco at the time of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Snyder, whose Beat Generation influenced her poetry writing style. In a video interview by SFMOMA, she recounts:
Basically, I came to painting from poetry. That was my first expression. Poetry, it’s in time, it’s one line at a time. Painting, you have the whole thing in one, and even a whole show in one. It’s like having a lightining strike, you know. It comes that way.
From her first forays into visual art, she showed a deep love of nature and its original symbiosis with human existence. Her abstract landscapes have always been devoid of human figures, seeking to represent only the beauty of the universe and her emotional relationship to it, as well as her own “inner landscapes”, recollections of places she has lived. With bold strokes and colours, her compositions are small, powerful canvases, a format she has in common with the first painter she fell in love with, Paul Klee (1879-1940). In the catalogue she is quoted as saying:
I think Klee was the first painter I fell in love with. He obsessed me. By obsessed, I mean that his paintings put me into a state of ecstasy. They possessed me. In Kairouan, he wrote, “color and I are one.” And I understood he was speaking of revelation. For me, he embodied the whole artistic world by himself.
The particularity of the exhibition “Etel Adnan et les modernes” at MUDAM lies in the juxtaposition of Adnan’s works with Modernist masters, whose ideas and works inspired the artist’s own. She has also revealed affinities with the way Klee worked and thought in an interview on the occasion of her exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee in 2018. To Klee’s “theory that a drawing is a line going for a walk”, she responded: “Absolutely. As a writer I get into a rhythm, and that rhythm is a combination of a mental and physical state. It is a total experience and Klee does that, he expresses that. And it touches me as a writer.”
In an interview with Apollo Magazine, on the occasion of that same show in Bern, she explained how she could understand where Klee’s work was coming from:
Klee lived a tragedy, he saw his world collapse. He witnessed the First World War, and how Germany got destroyed; he experienced the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and the end of the dream of the Bauhaus. And so a profound pessimism runs through his work. … My father was Syrian, from Damascus, but really he was from the Ottoman Empire. He was an Ottoman officer, a classmate of Atatürk – they went to the same military academy. I was the only child of his second marriage. By the time I was born, he was out of a job. At the age of 38, he was unemployed, because the whole empire had collapsed. And my mother, she was a Greek from Smyrna, and Smyrna also had totally burned to the ground. So I never got to witness their good days; I grew up with people whose worlds, whose lives, had been destroyed. So I understand devastation, I understand refugees, I understand defeat.
Adnan’s writing and visual art practices best intersect in her leporello works, the first of which she produced in 1961. Leporello is a book format with folded concertina-style pages of Asian origins, primarily China and Japan, which the artist used to create an intersection of poetry and words with watercolour painting. The format presented her with a dynamic paradox: its space expanded and multiplied as the pages unfurled, but when closed it was reduced to the symbolic space of a notebook. In the exhibition catalogue, she is quoted as writing in “To Write in Another Language” (in To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is: An Etel Adnan Reader, 2014):
Jim told me that Paul Klee would have liked making drawings on the accordion-like Japanese books made of rice paper that I used for so many years. I like the flow, the apparent lack of boundaries, the river image of these long unfolding papers.
The leporello takes on additional significance in the artist’s practice for its combination of the written word and the visual art, as in Arab countries such juxtaposition is also common. Adnan only knew how to speak Arabic in the streets, but she did not have access to the enourmous body of written works, nor could she write it. She did study it later in life encouraged by her father, but she could never write in Arabic. Copying the calligraphy though became part of her practice, in her leporello works, in which she could copy Arabic poems. In the exhibition catalogue, she is quoted as saying regarding her first leporello work, which is a mixture of Arabic calligraphy and painting:
Poetry and painting stayed separate, but one day when I decided to write, or, to be precise, copy poetry in Arabic with the intent to integrate ordinary writing into a style of working with watercolors and inks which was contemporary, I engaged myself along a path that still lies before me. I found Japanese folded papers, like the old books of Japanese woodcuts where each double page was an image tied, or not tied, to the following ones. Something of my childhood emerged: the pleasure of writing, line after line, Arabic sentences which I understood very imperfectly. … Year after year I worked on these long papers, like horizontal scrolls, with my imperfect writing, aware that it was the opposite of classical calligraphy that was at stake. … I integrated myself in the cultural destiny of the Arabs by very indirect ways, and I hope that the search is not over.
The format then was also an apt metaphor for mobility and aesthetic nomadism, which reflected her own nomadic life, as well as her diverse practice. Hans Ulrich Obrist quotes Adnan in his 2014 book Etel Adnan, In All Her Dimensions saying:
Around 1964, I discovered these Japanese “books” which fold like an accordion, on whose pages the Japanese painters mixed drawings with writings and poems … When I saw that format I thought it was a good way to get out of the page as a square or rectangle; it was like writing a river.
An example of her leporellos on show is an untitled 1965 work, which features watercolour stains and abstract hieroglyph-like symbols as well as lines with an English language poem by the artist, written during a time when America was at war, probably referring to the then-ongoing conflict in Vietnam.
The dialogue between Adnan’s art and the Modernists goes beyond Klee to encompass a selection of works chosen in collaboration with the artist herself on display in the first gallery of the museum, including a number of important works by Klee in addition to paintings by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Nicolas de Staël (1913-1955) and Georges Mathieu (1921-2012), as well as two tapestries designed at the art centre created by the architect Ramses Wissa Wassef (1911-1974). Adnan was drawn to Kandinsky’s and Malevich’s work from very early on, as well as the latter’s theories on colour, composition and the spiritual in art. The legacy of these masters is recognisable especially in her early paintings, compositions of geometrical shapes of colour creating new spatialities.
These conversations at MUDAM highlight some of the key themes in Adnan’s work, such as writing, gesture and weaving – this last offering a metaphor for life itself, as the museum explains. The film Ismyrne (2016) presents an intimate portrait of Adnan by contemporary Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.
In the second gallery are several groups of recent, abstract works by Adnan, which include paintings she describes as “inner landscapes”, drawing on her recollections of places she has visited. Here, the influence of de Staël and his return to pictorial tradition comes forth. However, although the modernist added layers to his paintings, creating foregrounds and backgrounds, Adnan’s kept her compositions flat. For Etel Adnan, as Sébastien Delot quotes her as saying in his catalogue introduction, “any work of art is an open window onto a world to which only it has access. These worlds are indefinable. They are epiphanies, visions.”
These landscapes are windows onto parallel worlds of memory and imagination. Adnan’s sensitivity to landscape is also visible in works depicting Mount Tamalpais in California and views of New York that are brought together in her film Motion (2012). These works are placed in dialogue with others by the painter and poet Eugénie Paultre (b. 1979, Paris) and sculptor Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Damascus), with whom she maintains a close connection.
Mount Tamalpais features in many of her works, and she explained her ‘obsession’ with it to Apollo Magazine:
That mountain became my best friend, it really did. It was more than just a beautiful mountain: it entered me, existentially, and filled my life. It became a poem around which I orientated myself.
The fascination Adnan feels for nature and all that surrounds her, like a poem, and a memory, takes on added significance when seen through Asian cultures, which she admires. Talking to Apollo Magazine she reveals:
You know, in Japanese and Chinese culture, traditionally, you don’t have images on the wall, but in books. You open a drawer, take out a book – you’re able to look for as long as you want. The gesture of looking at an image, and the way you read a poem, gets closer to an affinity between the arts. You understand that visual art is a matter of meditation, like a poem. I find that rather wonderful.
Talking to SFMOMA, the artist summarises a pivotal concept behind her work, saying:
Writing is drawing, drawing is writing. Because it’s the same gesture. They’re close already.
It is this silent, at time visible and at times invisible, merging of words and images seen as one, as well as the inherent abstraction in Adnan’s work that characterise her practice, and transform her creations into poetic meditations of language and colour.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Etel Adnan et les modernes” is on view from 6 June to 8 September 2019 at MUDAM Luxembourg.