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Lot Essay
“…my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.” - Etel Adnan
Lebanese-American artist and poet Etel Adnan is universally admired for her sophisticated philosophical abstractions. The intimately scaled California speaks to her love for the Golden State, where she moved in the 1950s, distilling the unique topography of the West Coast: ocean, mountains, forest, and desert. California could depict a moon above the sea, swaddled by mountains on either side, or the otherworldly light of a desert sunset. Invoking the mesa-like forms of California, Adnan once mused of her beloved chosen homeland, “Once I was asked in front of a television camera: ‘Who is the most important person you ever met?’ and I remember answering: ‘A mountain’” (E. Adnan, “Etel Adnan: Excerpt from Journey to Mount Tamalpais,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Blog, 2019, https://www.sfmoma.org/read/journey-mount-tamalpais/). California is a beautiful, abstract landscape fitting of the love felt for Adnan around the world.
A pale moon floats in a baby blue sea like a lone ship on the open waters. The landscape feels both transcendent and tactile, as a result of Adnan’s judicious use of thick oil paint. The sensitively rendered and textural scene is reminiscent of the setting sun in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s Sleep (1867-1870). Blue, yellow, orange, and mauve work in harmony like a tapestry or a mosaic, paving the way for contemporary painters like Christina Quarles. In works like California, we can see Adnan’s simultaneous lyricism and rigor. Her command of color is inimitable, “The paint, always applied with a palette knife, glows with iridescent clarity. Adnan stages encounters between hues, and no single tone, no matter how similar it is to another, appears twice in the same picture” (J. Asthoff, “Etel Adnan: Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg,” Artforum, February 2017, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201702/etel-adnan-66114).
California is as chromatically diverse as Adnan’s life, since her career crossed so many borders. As she split her time between Sausalito and Paris, she was always a California artist at heart. Adnan’s paintings have continued to inspire and garner widespread acclaim after her death. Etel Adnan: Poetry of Colors is currently on view at K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Her lauded retrospective Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure was mounted at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2021, and Christie’s recent sale “ADAM: Works from the Collection of Adam Lindemann” included her powerful canvas Untitled (2014).
Perhaps the most pressing attribute of Adnan’s cathedral-like paintings is how they so empathetically reveal the interconnectedness of color, nature, and humanity. As Adnan remarked, “We feel that the fog needs us, and that it anticipates us, and I will go as far as to say that it can even need us in order to be” (E. Adnan, quoted in A. Fitch, “The Non-Expressible Part of Thinking: Talking to Etel Adnan,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 8, 2017, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/non-expressible-part-thinking-talking-etel-adnan/). California peacefully unites the viewer with the land and insists on art’s perennial role in our global community.
Lebanese-American artist and poet Etel Adnan is universally admired for her sophisticated philosophical abstractions. The intimately scaled California speaks to her love for the Golden State, where she moved in the 1950s, distilling the unique topography of the West Coast: ocean, mountains, forest, and desert. California could depict a moon above the sea, swaddled by mountains on either side, or the otherworldly light of a desert sunset. Invoking the mesa-like forms of California, Adnan once mused of her beloved chosen homeland, “Once I was asked in front of a television camera: ‘Who is the most important person you ever met?’ and I remember answering: ‘A mountain’” (E. Adnan, “Etel Adnan: Excerpt from Journey to Mount Tamalpais,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Blog, 2019, https://www.sfmoma.org/read/journey-mount-tamalpais/). California is a beautiful, abstract landscape fitting of the love felt for Adnan around the world.
A pale moon floats in a baby blue sea like a lone ship on the open waters. The landscape feels both transcendent and tactile, as a result of Adnan’s judicious use of thick oil paint. The sensitively rendered and textural scene is reminiscent of the setting sun in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s Sleep (1867-1870). Blue, yellow, orange, and mauve work in harmony like a tapestry or a mosaic, paving the way for contemporary painters like Christina Quarles. In works like California, we can see Adnan’s simultaneous lyricism and rigor. Her command of color is inimitable, “The paint, always applied with a palette knife, glows with iridescent clarity. Adnan stages encounters between hues, and no single tone, no matter how similar it is to another, appears twice in the same picture” (J. Asthoff, “Etel Adnan: Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg,” Artforum, February 2017, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201702/etel-adnan-66114).
California is as chromatically diverse as Adnan’s life, since her career crossed so many borders. As she split her time between Sausalito and Paris, she was always a California artist at heart. Adnan’s paintings have continued to inspire and garner widespread acclaim after her death. Etel Adnan: Poetry of Colors is currently on view at K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Her lauded retrospective Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure was mounted at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2021, and Christie’s recent sale “ADAM: Works from the Collection of Adam Lindemann” included her powerful canvas Untitled (2014).
Perhaps the most pressing attribute of Adnan’s cathedral-like paintings is how they so empathetically reveal the interconnectedness of color, nature, and humanity. As Adnan remarked, “We feel that the fog needs us, and that it anticipates us, and I will go as far as to say that it can even need us in order to be” (E. Adnan, quoted in A. Fitch, “The Non-Expressible Part of Thinking: Talking to Etel Adnan,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 8, 2017, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/non-expressible-part-thinking-talking-etel-adnan/). California peacefully unites the viewer with the land and insists on art’s perennial role in our global community.