Farewell to Etel Adnan: painter and poet who combined drawing and writing in her art

Lebanese-born, naturalized American painter and poet Etel Adnan, among the most significant figures on the international art scene, has passed away at the age of 96 in Paris, where she lived. For too long ignored, it is only in the last decade that museums and galleries have begun to welcome her works into their collections: her recognition was in fact belated.

Born in 1925 in Beirut, she combined in her art drawing and writing, for her expressions of the same language. And she did so especially in the Leporellos, small accordion-folded booklets on which Japanese artists like to write and draw in ink. In her Leporellos, Etel Adnan copied poems composed by her writer friends and illustrated them with watercolor or ink, or repeated a series of words as a kind of litany or used India ink or tempera to draw what she could see.

Her first volume of poems, Moonshots, was published in 1966, and over the next twenty years she brought out books in English and French, including two prose books, Sitt Marie Rose (1978) and Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986). Worth mentioning are Arab Apocalypse and The Beirut-Hell Express. She has written documentaries on the civil war in Lebanon and also two plays.

“A committed artist, representative of the most important Arab modernity, in love with freedom, she never stopped espousing the cause of oppressed peoples in their struggles and sorrows. By the sheer force of her words, she committed herself against wars, militated for Indian and Palestinian causes, fought against the civil war that inflamed her native Lebanon,” Jack Lang, president of the Institut du Mond Arabe and former French minister of culture, wrote in tribute to her. "Celebrating both text and image, the artist has written in an infinite number of languages. With his Leporellos, his accordion books, he reconstructed the world with other forms, more poetic media, like rivers of words. These punctuations of colors, these dancing rhythms and calligraphies in perpetual motion are pure moments of joyful lyricism, close to a musical score."

Farewell to Etel Adnan: painter and poet who combined drawing and writing in her art

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