Etel Adnan

Untitled, 2018, SFMOMA

The multi-lingual and multi-cultural visual artist, poet, and essayist Etel Adnan was at home in many places—but she became a painter in California. Born in Beirut, Lebanon and trained as a philosopher in Paris, Adnan came to Dominican College in San Rafael in 1958 to teach aesthetics. Here, at age 34, she began painting, in dialogue with poets, musicians, and playwrights in Ann O’Hanlon’s Perception Workshops in Mill Valley in the 1960s. Working with abandoned materials—exhausted tubes of paint and an old palette knife—Adnan developed her own language of spontaneous gesture, infused with California’s light, in which geometric forms are rendered by knife into flat swathes of pure pigment.

She quickly became seduced by the local landscape; from her studio in Sausalito, she became fascinated by Marin County’s dramatic and dominating Mount Tamalpais. She drew and painted the mountain obsessively, capturing its changing moods at different times of day, in all seasons, as painters like Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet had done before her. In her book, Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), Adnan writes

“Once I was asked in front of a television camera: ‘Who is the most important person you ever met?’ and I remember answering: ‘A mountain.’ I thus discovered that Tamalpais was at the very center of my being.”

California remained Adnan’s home, and her inspiration, for fifty years—she even cited the geometry and starkness of California photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston as influences. In a Japanese store in San Francisco, Adnan discovered leporellos, hand-held, accordion-folded books. Her versions in watercolor and ink combine images with contemporary Arabic poetry or her own writing. The best known is  L’Apocalypse Arabe, made after the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. She experimented with tapestry making in San Francisco, producing works inspired by the flat weave of rugs and kilims of her homeland.

Adnan was a much-published writer of poetry, journalism, and fiction, in French, Arabic, and English, who wrote, as she said, what must be communicated through language, and painted what cannot. Her poetry collection Sea and Fog won the

 in 2013.

Although she lived in several cities in her lifetime and spent her last years in Paris, Adnan continued to consider herself “a Californian artist.” Not American, as she told Apollo Magazine in 2018, but Californian.  “The colors I use, the brightness — they are the colors of California.”