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Etel Adnan, The Linden Tree Poems, 2019

Breakthrough at 87
Etel Adnan lived in California and taught philosophy of art as a lecturer. When she was asked how she could talk about something she did not practice, she began painting in 1959 and never stopped. By the 1970s and 1980s, she was already an acclaimed writer, essayist, poet, and playwright who explored the trauma of displacement and war. She wrote significant parts of the libretto for the CIVIL warS, the opera by her friend Robert Wilson. Adnan published more than twenty books. It was not until 2012, when her work was shown at documenta 13, that she became internationally famous as a painter almost overnight at the age of 87.

Between languages and cultures
Adnan, who died in 2021, did not fit into fixed categories, neither in her art, which moved between literature and painting, nor in her nomadic life. She was born in 1925 in Beirut to a Greek mother and a Syrian father and grew up in an Arabic-speaking environment. She attended a Catholic French girls’ school in Beirut, and French became her first literary language. In 1949, she moved to Paris to study philosophy, then went to the United States to study and teach at University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. In 1972, she returned to Lebanon to write for newspapers but left again in 1976 because of the civil war, first relocating to Paris and later to California. Toward the end of her life, she lived with her partner, Syrian artist Simone Fattal, in Paris and in Brittany.

Apocalypse and hope
Adnan was always politically engaged, writing in a poetic yet uncompromising style. Her best-known book, a cycle of poems written in response to the Lebanese Civil War, is Arab Apocalypse (1980). The work combines poetry with drawings and gestures and depicts a world coming apart. Like her poetry, her abstract, color-field painting moves across cultures. At the same time, it appears more optimistic, an idiosyncratic echo of modernism, recalling artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, and Agnes Martin.

Leporellos
She consistently created leporellos in which writing, symbols, painting, and lines flow together into a poetic stream from which colors rise like pennants. “I like the flow, the apparent lack of boundaries, the river image of these long unfolding papers,“ Adnan said. She initially used leporellos to study Arabic poetry, copying poems by hand. Later, she also began incorporating original English texts into her work.

Love for the world
“My painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape,“ Adnan said. The theme of documenta 13, which brought her international recognition, was a renewed relationship with the earth and nature, in which nonhuman life forms possess an equal consciousness and their own history. This idea is also reflected in The Linden Tree Poems, which, like much of her poetry, is infused with human turmoil and with recurring images of landscape and nature: the seasons, plants, ants, butterflies, birds, mountains, the sea, the sky, darkness, and light.