Multilingual artist, writer, and poet Etel Adnan grew up in Lebanon and Syria and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in France prior to moving to America in 1955, where she continued her post-graduate studies in philosophy at UC Berkeley and Harvard. She settled in Sausalito, CA and taught Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at Dominican College in San Rafael from 1957 until 1972. It was during her time in Sausalito that Adnan began painting, due in part to her decision to stop writing in French following the Algerian War. In her earliest works, she painted with a palette knife directly onto canvas laid onto a table, her strokes firm, clear, and confident.
In the 1970s, while continuing her work as a visual artist, Adnan moved back to Beirut and served as cultural editor for two newspapers. Her first novel, Sitt Marie-Rose (which received the prestigious France-Pays Arabes award), was published in 1977 and she moved to Paris that same year; she would continue to divide her time between Paris and Sausalito for the remainder of her life. Adnan created work in a variety of media over the span of her impressive career, including films, poems, and tapestries, but it is her brightly colored abstract paintings for which she is best remembered.
Adnan focused primarily on landscapes without any figures and sought to explore the physical beauty of nature and the universe. Using a combination of bold colors and deceptively simple shapes and lines, her paintings simultaneously exude a sense of energy and serenity. Her nuanced, philosophical musings on color provide the viewer a window into her art: “Do colors have the power to break the Time barrier, and carry us into outer spaces, not only those made of miles and distances, but those of the accumulated experiences of life since its beginning or unbeginning?”. Adnan’s work is held in many private collections and museums around the world including the Royal Jordanian Museum, Tunis Museum of Modern Art, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, Sursock Museum in Beirut, Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the British Museum in London, the World Bank Collection and the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington DC.
