La Solitude de l’Or, 2001
Watercolor, ink, Indian ink, ink wash, gouache, colored pencil on Japanese paper in foldout book
18 x 12.4 x 2 cm (closed and folded into 22 parts)
18 x 284 cm (open)
[Photo: Courtesy Estate of Etel Adnan]
The effort that goes into embracing different visual and cultural stimuli, and at the same time that of condensing in a single image the genius loci and its inhabitants, are the distinctive elements of this Lebanon-born artist Etel Adnan. She herself was a combination of customs and cultures from the many countries she lived in, particularly the United States and France.
The work La Solitude de l’Or is painted on a small book containing a manuscript and a poem by the Lebanese writer Issa Makhlouf (b. 1955). The use of small books in the artist’s work comes from afar: in 1964, while visiting San Francisco, she discovered a series of Japanese notebooks that opened up in the manner of an accordion, inside which Japanese painters put drawings, texts, and poems. The artist found this to be an excellent alternative to the traditional format of the simple page. The result of this was La Solitude de l’Or, the accurate translation of the original Arabic poem in a visual equivalent, accompanied by various ink and watercolor drawings. The Japanese format of paper folded like an accordion creates a horizontal form that seems endless and that goes beyond the traditional frame for painted works. The fact that classical calligraphy is not used highlights the personal writing that, in its own imperfection, introduces the person who is literally writing into the work.
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925. Her father was a Syrian Muslim and her mother a Christian Greek. She grew up between Lebanon and Syria before moving for a period of time to France, and then to America. Educated in a Catholic convent run by French nuns in Beirut, in 1950 she moved to Paris to study Philosophy at the Sorbonne. In January 1955 she went to the United States to do graduate work in Philosophy at UC Berkeley and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972 she taught philosophy at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael, California. Her first paintings are dated to 1958, the year she moved to San Francisco at the peak of the rebirth of poetry led by Allen Ginsberg. In 1972, Adnan returned to Beirut to work as a cultural editor for two newspapers, Al Safa and L’Orient Le Jour.
In 2012 she took part with her artwork in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, in 2014 she had a retrospective at the Mathaf in Doha, in 2016 she had a solo show at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, in 2018 she had solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne, and in 2019 her work was on display at the Institute of Modern Art in Nuremberg, the MUDAM in Luxembourg, and the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado.
Adnan’s works can be found in numerous private collections and museums around the world, including the Royal Jordanian Museum, Museum of Modern Art in Tunis, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, Sursock Museum in Beirut, Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, British Museum in London, World Bank Collection, and National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.