Etel Adnan, Between East and West at Ithra showcases the Lebanese-American polymath’s eclectic influences, from Egyptian tapestries to Mexican murals.
“What can I say of the fact that I do not use my native tongue and do not have the most important feeling that as a writer I should have, the feeling of a direct communication with one’s audience?” Etel Adnan wrote in 1989. “It is like asking what I would have been if I were somebody else.” The Lebanese-American artist and poet’s seminal essay To Write in a Foreign Language reflects on her complex relationship with language through an account of her nomadic life. Living between Beirut, Paris, Berkeley and Sausalito, with intermittent travels to Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, she variously spoke, wrote in or heard around her Turkish, Armenian, French, English and Arabic. Adnan never visited Saudi Arabia, where her retrospective Between East and West is currently on view at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in Dhahran, but this setting seems fitting, like a continuation, as in life, of her tour of the world.
Curated by Sébastien Delot, former Director of LaM (Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut), the show consists of 41 works following Adnan’s multimedia artistic career from its beginnings in the 1950s to just before her passing in 2021. Encompassing loans from Sharjah Art Foundation, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Sursock Museum and private collectors, as well as four pieces from Ithra’s own collection, the selection of works reveals how Adnan translated her hybrid identity into her art, with its blend of Eastern and Western influences. In addition to her characteristic soft pastel landscapes and geometric compositions, the exhibition features rarely seen works including wool tapestries, a Super 8 film stitching together scenes shot in Yosemite, New York and San Francisco, and a 25-square-metre ceramic mural.
On loan from the Sursock is another rarity in her oeuvre, a comparatively large-scale painting from 1985 depicting a memory or impression of Mount Tamalpais, visible from Adnan’s studio windows in the San Francisco Bay Area. Patches of gentle grey make up the mountain face against a darkening sky, with blocks of green and yellow in the foothills signalling, perhaps, the arrival of autumn. The work’s striking subject, however, was one whose essence the artist sought to capture, with each new painting, for more than 20 years. For Adnan, the mountain represented a philosophical absolute; she once compared her work to that of Paul Cézanne, for whom Saint-Victoire became “painting itself”. Its recurrence in her work was also a celebration of nature, says Delot: “With the changing of seasons, mountains are like human faces – beaming when well-rested and droopy when tired. They are always the same, and yet never the same.”
Mount Tamalpais appears alongside one of the show’s six wool tapestries, showing abstract forms that echo the smears of paint in a classic ‘Etel Adnan’. The story of how these works were realised takes us from Egypt to France by way of medieval Europe. Adnan first encountered the medium during her studies in Paris, when she was introduced to The Lady and the Unicorn, a major tapestry cycle woven c.1500. Soon afterwards, she visited an art centre in the Egyptian village of Harrania, home to a tapestry studio founded in the 1950s by architect Ramses Wissa Wassef and whose productions have been exhibited and collected worldwide.
Taking inspiration from this trip, as well as from the Bauhaus school, she completed preparatory drawings for her own tapestries, which were brought to life in the 2010s in a tapestry workshop in the Aubusson region of France. “For Etel, these works were like a bridge between the carpet, which is more of an Oriental tradition, and the Western tapestry,” says Delot. Installed in Ithra’s lobby, the expansive ceramic wall – one of fewer than 10 that Adnan made in her life – also speaks to her international influences, her interest in the art form having been piqued by Juan O’Gorman’s mosaic murals on the façade of the University of Mexico’s Central Library during a visit there in 1957.
Bringing home the diversity of Adnan’s practice, both in terms of media and cultural influences, is one of her famous sculptural leporelli, or Japanese-inspired booklets with concertina-style bindings. Entitled Freedom of People, Freedom of Animals, Freedom of Plants, Freedom of Nature (2011), the work’s pages are inscribed with the words of its rhythmic title, like a rally chant, in Arabic script. Adnan also often copied verses by great Arab poets whose work she admired, including Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab and Mahmoud Darwish, into her artist books. In To Write in a Foreign Language, Adnan reflects on the child-like enjoyment she found in writing Arabic words in her early leporelli despite her imperfect grasp of their meaning, having never mastered the language. She had discovered her relationship with Arabic, however, when she began painting. Recalling feeling conflicted about her reliance on French, particularly in light of the Algerian war of independence, she writes “I soon realised that to me this meant a new language and a solution to my dilemma: I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.”
