Review: Etel Adnan: Light's New Measure @ Guggenheim
I’m not gonna lie: I learned about Etel Adnon on the day that she died. But I am teaching myself about her and the Guggenheim’s show—Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure—was as good an introduction as any.
In her first major New York museum solo show, Adnon—a late poet, novelist, journalist, and painter—excites with her small canvases claimed to be her, “inner landscapes.”
Born in 1925 in Beirut growing up trilingual, Etel Adnan grew up trilingual in Greek, French, and Arabic. She was primarily a poet when, at age 34, she began to paint. She left Lebanon in 1975, displaced by civil war, and moved to Paris, one of her two adopted homes, the other being Sausalito, in California’s Bay Area.
Like Kandinsky, who picked up the brush at age 30, and whom the museum attempts to draw together through a halfhearted effort, Adnan was late to painting. The artists do share another similarly, sharply pointed out by the Observer’s Farah Abdessamad: the two artists both were made DPs by wars and revolutions.
If there’s sadness in Adnan’s eyes, you wouldn’t be able to tell it from the works. The diminutive pieces, smeared liberally with oil paint directly from the palette knife, are inviting abstractions and semi-figurative abstractions, such as in the series on Mount Tamalpais—a site to which she was transfixed like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters; she even painted it while away in France.
Adnan applies clean streaks of impastoed colors, which are always calming, whether they are warm or cold. Most paintings are untitled and their dates appear to guesses. Mont Tamalpäis (2020), as an example, is earthy with a magenta square interrupted by some energetic strokes of a concoction of gray mixed with green. The bulk of the work is in greens with a few shapes (triangle, squares) in tones of light yellow and beige. It’s clear Adnan was taking risks as she smattered the canvas: Greens collide with a maroon and overlap faintly. It looks like watching a weather pattern from a satellite map. Yet, everything feels human, natural, and placid. The colors Adnan chooses always compliment each other and the viewer alike.
The art critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie said a “fraught dualism between tranquillity and turbulence” permeated all of Adnan’s writing and paintings. Perhaps this is true of her writing, of which we get brief blurbs in the exhibit; if it’s true of her paintings, I couldn’t tell because their equanimity is so intense.