Etel Adnan: A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun

ETEL ADNAN

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925. She is a poet, essayist, journalist, playwright, tapestry designer, and painter. Her books have been translated into over 10 languages, put to music, made into operas, and adapted for the screen.

She won the Prix de l’Amitié franco-arabe for her 1977 novel, Sitt Marie Rose, and was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2014. Adnan has had solo exhibitions at Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2016); Galerie Lelong, New York, NY (2015); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2015); and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY (2014). Her painting has been included in group exhibitions at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli, Italy (2017); the New Museum, New York, NY (2014); and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012). She currently lives and works in Paris.

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Cover, inside flap, and recto of bookmark: Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017. Oil on canvas. 13 × 9½ inches.

Courtesy Etel Adnan and Galerie Lelong & Co. © Etel Adnan Inside flap and verso of bookmark: Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017. Oil on canvas. 13 × 9½ inches.

Courtesy Etel Adnan and Galerie Lelong & Co. © Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun On view beginning April 7, 2018 Etel Adnan: A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun is made possible by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in support of MASS MoCA and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States. The exhibition is curated by Elise Y. Chagas, a secondyear student in the Williams College Graduate Program.

1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, MA 01247 413.MoCA.111 massmoca.org

yellow sun green sun yellow sun red sun blue sun

“We share words; language is really meant, above all, to speak to someone, to engage in dialogue. But for me, it’s more involved with history as it is being made.”6

A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun

An essayist, novelist, journalist, playwright, and poet —as well as a tapestry designer, watercolorist, and painter —Etel Adnan’s sprawling artistic practice tests the possibilities of expression and the limits of communication.

The focus of this exhibition is her painting and poetry, two languages of many that the Arab-American artist has mastered over a lifetime. Like a translator, she moves between them in search of pure meaning.

This gallery guide quotes extensively from essays, articles, and interviews in order to frame the artist’s work in her own words.

Visitors are encouraged to explore a selection of Adnan’s written work in the exhibition’s first gallery—you can use the tear-out bookmark on the last page of this guide to mark poems or passages that resonate with you here. (Or you can take it with you to use at home!)

“The things we believe to be inert always have something to say. Everything speaks! And for me, painting is a language beyond words.”1

Adnan made her first painting in 1959, and since then her technique has remained the same. She never uses a brush, preferring to apply colors with a palette knife onto canvases set down flat on a table, completing each painting in one sitting. Often she uses no more than four hues, which in her hands become flat, planar fields whose interrelation is elusive and indelible.

Most of Adnan’s compositions are untitled —the artist refuses to shortcut the experience of her painting. Nameless, they can only be distinguished by description, which itself never satisfies. Adnan’s own process unfolds in response to what is before her, physically and in her mind’s eye. The finished works carry the immediate energy of the artist’s hand, which they divulge upon observation.

weather, every time of day: velvet green in the summer, milky white in the fog, radiant purple in the dusk. Each painting in which the familiar triangular form appears is a landscape, but also a loving portrait. Cézanne had Mont Sainte-Victoire; Hokusai had Mount Fuji; Adnan has Mount Tamalpais.

“I think often of Cézanne and Hokusai, of their relation to their mountain, and of mine. I know by experience, by now, that no subject matter, after a while, remains just a subject matter, but becomes a matter of life and death, our sanity resolved by visual means.”3 In the process of painting the mountain repeatedly, Adnan discovered what she describes as an unbreakable bond between painting and perception. Both freeze the constant transformation of the world into comprehensible moments.

The poet and publisher Simone Fattal, Adnan’s long-time partner, has said that the mountain is embedded in her whole being, her identity. Adnan has described it as her home. Even when she has lived elsewhere— Beirut and Paris—the mountain comes with her as she paints Mount Tamalpais from memory and dreams.

“It seems to me that I write what I see, paint what I am.”4 While Adnan’s painting is abstract and immediate, much of her writing is specific and historical. She began to compose seriously in response to the war in Vietnam and channeled the rage and sorrow that swept the developing world in the sixties and seventies. 5 Though she saw the similarities between mid-century struggles for independence from ideologies and geographies imposed by empire and colonization, the conflicts that have racked the Levant for the past century are her special focus. Through her writings, she draws attention to the way that power and politics are embedded in language itself.

“To see in order to paint. To paint in order to see.”2 Though she began by painting “pure” abstractions, landscapes slowly emerged in her practice. Her obsession with Mount Tamalpais, the highest peak in the San Francisco Bay Area, was central to this development. For fifty years, Adnan lived intermittently in its shadow in a home in Sausalito, CA, from which she captured the mountain in every season, in every kind of

Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017. Oil on canvas. 13 × 16⅛ inches.

Collection of Guilherme and Andrea Johannpeter © Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017. Oil on canvas. 13 × 16⅛ inches.

Courtesy Etel Adnan and Galerie Lelong & Co. © Etel Adnan

As Adnan’s circumstances have conditioned her life, so they have affected her work as well. She is an American citizen by choice, but she was born in Lebanon during the period of French mandate, exiled from her Arab heritage. School was in French, where Arabic, and by extension that which is Arab, was discouraged and denigrated. She taught herself the language as an adult.

“Somehow we breathed an air where it seemed that being French was superior to anyone, and as we were obviously not French, the best thing was at least to speak French. Little by little, a whole generation of educated boys and girls felt superior to the poorer kids who did not go to school and spoke only Arabic. Arabic was equated with backwardness and shame. Years later I learned that the same thing was happening all over the French empire, in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, [Sub-Saharan] Africa, and Indochina.”7 Adnan says she turned to painting in a conscious effort of what might be called personal decolonization. Witnessing the atrocities occurring across former and thenpresent French colonies from California, she was compelled to exorcise the French language from herself. She began to write primarily in English. Defiantly, she declared, “I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.”8

When Adnan returned to Lebanon in 1972, she also returned to French, writing furiously for a Lebanese audience even after she left at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). In 1978, she published Sitt Marie Rose, her celebrated novel based on the true story of a woman who was killed

by Christian Maronite militia for aiding Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Two years later, she published The Arab Apocalypse, the novel-length poem whose first line serves as this exhibition’s title.

“I was discovering—living—exile’s profound meaning. What is exile if not the violent and involuntary loss of all the living symbols of one’s identity? At this point, instead of me leaving, it was Beirut which was leaving me, and, we know it now, forever. Here was an exile that was total, absolute: I was in Beirut and I was witnessing that she was never going to grow normally, to remain the core of what she was. I was seeing (without any exaggeration) the meaning of paradise lost.”

The Arab Apocalypse was composed as Adnan attempted to process the brutality of the Civil War. The result was a delirious text that seems to be on fire, summoning and conflating burning suns and smoldering encampments. Later translated by Adnan into English in 1989, the lines of text are studded with small hand-drawn hieroglyphs that articulate explosion, an intensity beyond written language: “…the signs are my excess of emotions. I cannot say more. I wrote by hand, and here and there, I put a word, and I made instinctively a little drawing, a sign. I kept those signs for the printed book. I did not add them: they came during the writing, they’re a part of it.”9 In her leporellos, accordion-folded artist’s books, Adnan has experimented with the combination of word and image. Across the narrative yet lyrical form, which in some cases expand to over seven feet in length, she highlights the proximity between script and line. The artist filled her first leporellos with carefully copied poems by her favorite Arab poets; elsewhere, she

covers the surface uniformly with abstract marks, or loosely articulated landscapes.

“This approach which combines literature and art…seems to bring out a sense of becoming, of fluidity, of constant transformation, as being essential to the mind: the mind never rests on these scrolls as it moves back and forth on them...”10 Reflecting on the sense of movement that characterizes the leporellos, Adnan has stated, “Translation is transportation.”

As someone who has carried her life with her, inhabiting the nomadism endemic to exile, she has perhaps always been translating. In writing, she tasks language with the burden of violence and pain beyond expression, stretching it to its breaking point. On canvas, Adnan conjures wordless harmony.

— ELISE Y. CHAGAS

“Poetry, it is believed, is the revelation of the self. Painting, the revelation of the world. But it could also be the other way around.”

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— Etel Adnan Etel Adnan, “Conversations with Etel Adnan,” interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Etel Adnan: In All Her Dimensions (Doha: Mathaf Art Foundation, 2014), 33.

2 Etel Adnan, “Journey to Mount Tamalpais,” [1986] in To look at the sea is to become what one is: an etel adnan reader, ed. Thom Donovan and Brandon Shimoda (New York: Nightboat Books, 2014), 333.

3 Ibid., 331.

4 Ibid., 311.

5 Etel Adnan, “Conversations with Etel Adnan,” 79.

6 Ibid., 62.

7 Etel Adnan, “To Write in a Foreign Language,” [1984] in To look at the sea is to become what one is: an etel adnan reader, ed. Thom Donovan and Brandon Shimoda (New York: Nightboat Books, 2014), 248.

8 Ibid., 253.

9 Etel Adnan, “Conversations with Etel Adnan,” 81.

10 Etel Adnan, “The Unfolding of An Artist’s Book,” Discourse, Vol. 20 No. 1/2 (Winter and Spring 1998), 22.

11 Etel Adnan, “Journey to Mount Tamalpais,” 311.

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