Etel Adnan, The Poet, Novelist, Journalist and Artist – Guggenheim Oct 8, 2021

  • Etel Adnan Art

  • Poetry Foundation

  • tk

    Exhibition – Etel Adnan Lights – New Measure

    She was born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek mother and Syrian father; grew up speaking French, Arabic, and Greek; and as an adult has lived for extended periods in Lebanon, the United States, and France. She began to paint in the late 1950s, while working as a professor of philosophy in Northern California. It was a period when, in protest of France’s colonial rule in Algeria, she renounced writing in French and declared that she would begin “painting in Arabic.”

    While Adnan’s writings have been unflinching in their critique of war and social injustice, her visual art is an intensely personal distillation of her faith in the human spirit and the beauty of the natural world. She has stated, “It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.” Adnan creates her paintings decisively and intuitively.

    (Via Guggenheim)

  • The Luminous Abstractions of Etel Adnan (New Yorker)