Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925. Her mother was a Greek Christian from Smyrna and her father a Syrian Muslim who had served in the Ottoman army. Growing up among several languages helped shape a life that crossed national and artistic boundaries.

Adnan studied philosophy in Paris and the United States before teaching in California. She began painting while also developing her writing, making small, intensely coloured landscapes in which Mount Tamalpais became a recurring presence.

Her poetry and prose addressed war, displacement and the vulnerability of ordinary lives. “Sitt Marie Rose”, set during the Lebanese civil war, drew on the killing of a social worker and confronted the violence of sectarian divisions.

For almost fifty years Adnan shared her life with the artist Simone Fattal, whose Post-Apollo Press published much of her writing. They lived between Beirut, California and Paris. Adnan’s paintings gained wider international attention after documenta in Kassel in 2012, when she was 87, bringing museum exhibitions late in a long working life. She died in Paris in 2021, aged 96.