Writing and painting across languages and continents, Etel Adnan embodies a powerful and distinctive position in Middle Eastern cultural discourses. In the same way that her novel 'Sitt Marie Rose' breaks the silence on the individual internal conflicts that unravelled during the Lebanese Civil War, Etel's paintings explore internal, mnemonic landscapes. The sheer intimacy and consistency arising from her shapes, colours and textures, tirelessly repeated year after year, testify to a spiritual discipline and a love for the world availed in a manner that brings comfort to the heart and mind.
“Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words, but colours and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression”
Etel Adnan was born 1925 in Beirut. After pursuing studies at La Sorbonne, Paris, and Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, she started teaching philosophy at the Dominican College of San Rafael in California in the late 1950s. In the same period, Etel began to work on her first paintings, most often in the form of abstract compositions. These consist of squares of colours applied on the canvas directly from the tube. An isolated red square becomes the signature motif of the artist and the focal point of most of her paintings. In the same way that her outstanding poetic production directly appeals to the sensitivity of the reader, Etel Adnan leverages in her painting what she refers to as "the immediate beauty of colours."
“When the colour comes out of the tube I don’t want to mix it, because there’s such an immediate beauty about the joy of colour.”
California captures the exquisiteness of Adnan’s cubist abstraction in a composition recalling the cityscape of a place that she once called home, at a time where she lived in the small waterfront town of Sausalito in San Francisco Bay. In fact, one may recognize in this painting the well-known skyline of San Francisco. It is characteristic of Adnan’s signature technique, infused with meditative and introspective undertones. The thick texture of the paint translates the urge and passion poured into this mnemonic piece, which Adnan created with a palette knife, applying pigments directly from the tube. The city emerges from an amalgamation of contrasting geometric shapes, trapped between a pale grey sky and an abstract mound shining red under a crimson star. Although this painting clearly mirrors a particular landscape in Adnan’s memory, it also leaves a broad space of interpretation to the viewer, with the red shapes evocative of both hills or the sea in what could be dusk or dawn on the city.
Adnan’s choice of bold, pulsating colours expresses sentiments of nostalgia, joy and serenity: “Art is also a kind of language – but it’s a language of feeling. When I paint, I am happy. I am both an optimistic, happy person, and caught in and aware of tragedy. Although I lived in California most of my life, I never had a spell of time where I could forget the problems of the Middle East. Every morning the newspaper would remind me” (Etel Adnan cited: Kaya Genc, ‘For Etel Adnan, a show in Turkey is a Symbolic Homecoming’, Apollo Magazine, 3 June 2021 (online)). Three years later, upon her return to Lebanon, Etel applied the same technique and vibrant tones to an abstract landscape of Beirut, sold in these rooms on October 14, 2021 (lot 1). This work Untitled (1973) is deeply evocative of the artist’s love and concern for her home country during a time of political upheavals in the Middle East, and together with our present painting, it shows the deep emotions that connect Adnan to her “internal landscapes,” her “space of memories.”
Reference:
Wikipedia Commons (Image: Noah Friedlander), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Online) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_from_Mount_Tamalpais_on_February_18,_2019.jpg
