Etel Adnan

As a poet, painter and philosopher, Lebanese American artist Etel Adnan was a major figure in Arab modernism. Her creative output was shaped by her extensive travels: from studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and Harvard, to teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area and her trips to Mexico and North Africa. It was not until the 1960s that she turned to painting, exploring what she called “the immediate beauty of color.” Her works on canvas often center around single shapes, placed against solid rectilinear backgrounds. She also painted landscapes on foldable, book-like paper screens inspired by Japanese leporellos. As part of her lifelong fascination with writing, she also incorporated Arabic calligraphy into her paintings and books. In recent years, her art has been included in museum shows dedicated to women artists and postwar abstraction.
For the first major exhibition in Saudi Arabia of Adnan’s work, the catalog brings together a number of works from all periods and in all mediums to show her richness and diversity of output while solidifying her legacy as one of the great creative figures in the 20th-century Arab world. The book is enriched through three curatorial essays and a comprehensive, multilingual chronology.
Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was born in Beirut to a Greek Orthodox mother and a Turkish father. She was a professor in the philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California from 1958 to 1972. Upon returning to Lebanon she became a journalist for Al Safa magazine. She wrote essays and poetry in English, French and Arabic.