Etel Adnan, artist-world, died in Paris

Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan, here in 2014, died on November 14, 2021 in Paris.

Pierre René-Worms / RFI

Text by: Muriel Maalouf

3 min

Poet, essayist, novelist, painter, Etel Adnan, an immense artist, died in Paris almost a hundred years old, at the age of 96.

From a Syrian Muslim father and a Greek Christian mother, born in Beirut, Etel Adnan will have had a belated recognition.

But for ten years the planet has torn its works from Paris to the United States through the Arab world.

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Etel Adnan receives at her home in her living room.

A Haussmannian apartment, rue Madame, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris that she shares with her partner and accomplice Simone Fattal, also an artist.

Etel immediately puts you at ease.

The sparkling gaze, it is difficult to give it more than 90 years.

She says: I start my day by reading L'Orient Le jour, the Lebanese French-language daily.

“ 

I need an engine to start,

 ” she says.

The late recognition of Etel Adnan did not disturb her in her daily life.

Long ignored, she has worked almost a lifetime in the shadows.

It is because the art world has long neglected female artists and looked with contempt on anything that does not come from the West.

But for the past ten years, museums and galleries have been snapping up her works where mountains spring up, those of Lebanon and California where she has lived a large part of her life.

The yellow, orange, green tones on the borders of abstraction exude serenity.

She also likes to mix writing with painting and creates leporellos, these accordion notebooks from Japan, where she mixes poetry and naive, almost childish drawing.

To write is to draw

The Center Pompidou Metz is currently devoting an exhibition to her which she has called

Writing is drawing

. One can see there among others these accordion books which can be up to ten meters long. Etel Adnan copied poems from contemporary Iraqi authors, including Abd el-Wahhab al-Bayyati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, with whom she was friends.

Because before painting Etel Adnan was a writer.

Sitt Marie Rose

, his first story, is taken from a real fact.

It is the story of a woman who is crushed by the Lebanese civil war as she fights for justice in her country.

Follow

L'Express Beirut Hell

,

Arabic Apocalypse

, where Adnan shouts his pain and revolt against the wars that tore the Middle East.

She writes in French first and then in English, the artist who has difficulty handling the Arabic language finally integrates it into her painted works, enjoying stretching out the letters.

The mountain and then the sea

In recent years, as a refugee in Brittany, it is the sea that she observes and paints after the mountains.

The sea and the mountains are what her small native country, Lebanon, is made of, to which she remains attached from the United States and France where she lived.

Lover of nature and life, she is in the present and confides to her editor and gallery owner at Galerie Lelong, Jean Frémont: “ 

I

believe that everything that lives has a will and everything is alive, even matter that seems inert

 ”.

The great lady is gone, her luminous work remains very much alive.

► To read also:

Etel Adnan: “My happiness is painting”

(2016)

► 

Also to listen:

Etel Adnan in the program

En G major

(2015)

► Also to listen: 

"Crime d'honneur", Etel Adnan at the Festival d'Avignon (2014)

► Also to listen: the reading of two texts by Etel Adnan:

Jennine

and

Un Crime d'honneur

, voiced in the frame "Ca va, ça va le Monde!"

From RFI.

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