Last week, famous Lebanese poetess and artist Etel Adnan passed away at the age of 96. It is hard to adequately summarize the breadth, the depth, and the impact of her contributions to our understanding of contemporary humanism and her employment of a confluence of artistic and literary themes. She leaves behind a poetic and artistic legacy by manifesting her identities through her writing and art, which will remain unique in cultural and intellectual inspection.
Etel Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon, to a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, and got Catholic instruction from a French school run by nuns. In a city that was a delightful blend of societies, Adnan retained every one of the foundations and dialects that she witnessed with a receptive outlook and interest. At 24 years old, she traveled to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, and in 1955 she moved to the United States, where she sought after postgraduate examinations at Berkeley and Harvard. She chose to settle down in the States where she invested her energy teaching (especially between 1958 and 1972 in California) and composing, chiefly investigating subjects like identity, migration, history, and legislative issues, which would become intermittent in her training.
Adnan’s work traverses various mediums including drawings, oil compositions, films, sonnets, woven artwork, political news coverages, note pads, and books. Her initial works in the fine arts made during the 1950s were cozy in scale and have dynamic structures, where the urgent component is typically a red square made with a blade by straightforwardly applying colors from the cylinder. She utilized this gestural and conceptual method to make colors stand apart as she was intrigued by their impact. Despite being interested in jumping into various materials and strategies, her artworks are always recognizable as she continues to invoke her Arab origins in order to add a personal touch to her work. This shows up oftentimes in her embroideries series, propelled by the feeling and shade of Persian carpets.
As a multidimensional painter, writer, and author, Etel Adnan was a distinguished voice in contemporary Arab American writing and workmanship. Her training, both visual and verbal, is described by a serious association with the world. Her writing addresses a culturally diverse exchange between Arabic and American culture. As an incredible women’s rights activist and hostile to war ally, her craft contains numerous references to governmental issues and the viciousness of war. In her novel Sitt Marie Rose, she studies the war through the lens of Marie Rose Boulos who was kidnapped and murdered by militias. She was also witness to the different schisms of the Lebanese Civil War.
Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2013. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut and Hamburg
While her artworks delve, albeit halfheartedly, into politics, they also uncover Adnan’s solid readiness to draw about the world. Through them she reviews natural scenes and topographies from her homes in Lebanon and California. She does so by referencing the recognizable scenes from her adolescence in her depictions of the Mediterranean Sea, and from her grown life through the glow of the yellows and reds, mountains and skylines, taking the shape of California. Her artistry, specifically paintings like Moonshots and Seasons, is a window into Adnan’s recollections and sentiments.
Not only was her art revolutionary and novel, her life was an act of liberation from antiquated convention. Beginning in her fifties, Adnan openly identified as lesbian and began a lifelong relationship with painter Simone Fattal, who remained with her till Adnan’s passing. Fattal was a successful painter in her own right, and would go on to found and publish the Post-Apollo Press. They lived in absolute privacy, but the mere existence of an openly queer artistic power-couple was an idea unheard of in Lebanese and Arab circles. They never wrote about their relationship, but they wrote in praise of each other’s work. Fattal lovingly said, “she [Adnan] would come on the weekends and work. Was it the urgency of time available or her own impatient energy that made her always finish an oil painting in one sitting? I would come later and discover the whole world transcribed on the surface of the canvas”.
All through her creative profession, she never deserted the act of theoretical composition, which especially discloses her affectability to shapes and shadings. Painted from recognition, her scenes incorporate mountains, skies, and skylines addressed as squares, triangles, pyramids, and circles, all described by the work of splendid shadings. Etel Adnan devoted a great deal of energy in a Herculean commitment to Arab American culture and writing, to the liberation of women, and to the anti-war developments which are prominent in her early works. Her oeuvre gave voice to Diaspora Arab communities that didn’t have one, while continually utilizing quiet, amiable, and secure tones. Her work is an amalgam of purely unadulterated energy, brimming with good faith and enthusiasm for the world. Her Arab spirit and purpose is best captured by the following quote:
To try to be distracted by poetry, by trees. To see the trees grow, in a hurry. To appear and disappear. To take refuge from bestial conquest in false shelters. To chase the refugee, to flush him out of his new refuge. To lodge a bullet in the head and the back of a Palestinian. To add Iraqis to the – – butchery
— In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country
Edited by Maria Noujaim