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Art

Etel Adnan’s Elegant Canvases Shine in Her Van Gogh Museum Retrospective

Rawaa Talass
May 26, 2022 4:49PM

Etel Adnan, 2016. Photo by Fabrice Gibert. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris/New York.

Etel Adnan
Marée Basse, 1967-73 / 2017
Galerie Lelong & Co.

“I write what I see, I paint what I am.” These are the words of the prominent Lebanese American poet and painter Etel Adnan, who died last year at the age of 96. Her acclaimed work persists, however, as it is being shown for the first time in the Netherlands in the retrospective “Colour as Language,” on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam through September 4, 2022.

Unlike traditional retrospectives, the exhibition thoughtfully pairs 10 canvases by Vincent van Gogh with approximately 70 of Adnan’s vibrant paintings, works on paper, and tapestries, all dating from the mid-1960s to 2021. The result is a dialogue that transcends time and space.

Installation view, “Colour as Language” at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam.

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One might consider it a random, unlikely combination of artists who were born in different epochs and places. Yet upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that Adnan and Van Gogh were both expressive, sensitive artists who shared in common a deep affinity for nature, beauty, color, and the written word.

“We thought of the match between Van Gogh and Adnan because they both have such a strong connection to nature,” said Van Gogh Museum curator Sara Tas in a recent interview. “When you look at their work, you feel like they must have felt like one with nature. They have an empathy with nature that shines through.”

Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2015. Collection Jean Frémon. © The Estate of Etel Adnan. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris/New York.

It was Tas who initially suggested situating Van Gogh and Adnan side by side in the form of an exhibition. A year prior to Adnan’s passing, the curator personally met with and interviewed the artist in France, where she lived during her final years with her long-term partner, Syrian-born artist Simone Fattal. “She reacted so positively to the idea and felt so honored.…It’s nice to have her words and reflections on Van Gogh and how she saw his work in relation to her own,” Tas recalled. “She died at 96 years old, but still, there’s something crisp and clear in the way she formulates things.”

Adnan was born to a Syrian father and Greek mother in the Lebanese capital of Beirut in 1925. In the 1950s, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was in this cultural city that she first laid eyes on Van Gogh’s iconic scenery and self-portraiture. “She explained that when she grew up in Beirut, there were no museums and she hadn’t seen any images of his work,” Tas said. “In Paris, she saw his self-portraits and said they had a ‘haunting presence,’ and that stayed with her throughout her entire life.”

Installation view, “Colour as Language” at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam.

Adnan was taken by Van Gogh’s bedazzling self-depictions, marked with a direct gaze and an abundance of swirly lines: “I was amazed that a person could look at himself with such precision, such intensity, to an unbearable degree. That shock never disappeared,” Adnan once said. There is also, in the eyes of Adnan, an emotional undertone in Van Gogh’s colors and shapes. “If you look attentively, you can feel his inner problems, his fights,” she remarked. “You know him more intimately through his canvases, as if you were talking with him.”

In 1955, Adnan moved to California. It was on the West Coast, around the age of 34, that she first picked up painting. She has become known for her abstract compositions of mountains, the sea, the sun, and the sky, usually portrayed in thick, block-like shapes that live harmoniously together on canvas. There is an elegant simplicity in her calming oeuvre, and perhaps that is why it is universally loved.

Installation view, “Colour as Language” at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam.

Adnan viewed color as a rich visual language on its own, applying—with a palette knife, placing paint directly from the tube—strong and soft tones onto her work. As Tas put it, “It’s like intensity and subtlety in one.”

In her conversation with the curator, Adnan spoke of the emotive relationship between color and nature: “It is as if nature was alive and conscious and wants to affirm its presence, its power,” the artist said. “It is color that makes us realize the intensity of nature.”

Etel Adnan
La baie d'Erquy, 2021
Galerie Lelong & Co.

Just like Van Gogh, Adnan, who was a former cultural editor in Beirut, dedicated a lot of time to writing. She was particularly partial to poetry, stories, and uniquely dotting Japanese-style, accordion-shaped “leporellos” with words. She had read many of Van Gogh’s personal letters and proposed that he would have been a writer had he not pursued painting.

According to the curator, placing Van Gogh and Adnan under one roof is not about influence, but rather perspective. “I didn’t want it to be ‘share and compare’ and to say how important Van Gogh was for Adnan; that would be way too simplistic,” Tas explained. “Adnan helps us to look at Van Gogh again and maybe see new things. I really wanted to create the opportunity for our public to discover her work.”

Installation view, “Colour as Language” at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam.

The irony of Adnan’s story is that although she was active for many years, she achieved international fame in her eighties, when her work was exhibited exactly a decade ago at Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Now widely collected, Adnan’s artworks in “Colour as Language” have come from reputable institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Sursock Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum.

The exhibition space feels light and contemplative. “It’s almost like you are stepping into a painting by Etel Adnan,” said Tas. “Many people at the opening said that it felt like stepping into a dream world.”

Rawaa Talass