Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan grew up in an environment of cultural tension

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut on 24 February 1925. The daughter of a Greek mother and a Syrian father who had served as an officer in the Ottoman army in Smyrna, she learnt Greek and Turkish from her parents, while those around her mainly spoke Arabic. By attending a French girls' school, she also acquired extensive knowledge of French, which became her first literary language, joined by English later on. In Lebanon, which was occupied by France until 1943, the tensions between Western and Eastern culture were omnipresent for Etel Adnan, which strongly influenced her later artistic work. She left school at the age of 16 and initially worked as an auxiliary in the French army, where she was lucky enough to meet the writer and orientalist Jean Gaulmier (1905-1997), who recognised and encouraged her talents and made it possible for her to take the Baccalauréat alongside her work.

Studies at the Sorbonne and Harvard

Etel Adnan began studying literature in 1949 at the newly founded École Supérieure des Lettres de Beyrouth in the class of Gabriel Bounoure (1886-1969) and worked temporarily as a teacher until a scholarship enabled her to go to Paris and continue her studies at the Sorbonne. She obtained a degree in philosophy and moved on to the USA, where she studied at the University of California in Berkeley and at Harvard University before taking up a teaching position at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael. She returned to Lebanon in 1972 as a features editor for the French-language newspapers L'Orient-Le Jour and Al Safa. During this time, she met the artist Simone Fattal (b. 1942), who became her life partner until Adnan's death. The Lebanese Civil War forced Etel Adnan to return to Paris in 1976, where her anti-war novel Sitt Marie Rose was published, and she supported Robert Wilson on his unfinished theatre project The CIVIL warS.

Advocate for women's rights and against the war

Etel Adnan worked with her friend, the actress and feminist activist Delphine Seyrig (1932-1990), on a film project about the Wild West icon Calamity Jane (1856-1903). In the late 1950s, she turned to painting, which she saw as a universal language. After the Algerian War of Independence, Etel Adnan no longer wanted to use the French language - which she had mainly used for her literary work - as her aversion to French colonialism had become too great. She no longer wanted to write in French, but to paint in Arabic, she declared. The rejection of war remained her major theme throughout her life, alongside the connection between man and nature. Etel Adnan received prizes and awards for her art, including the Lichtwark Prize for her life's work in 2021.

Etel Adnan died in Paris on 14 November 2021.