A tessellation of vibrant crimson, cerulean blue, yellow and green, Untitled is a magnificent example of Etel Adnan’s coveted abstract landscapes. Executed circa 1973, the present work was created at a pivotal moment in Adnan’s career, a year after her move back to Beirut after spending fourteen years teaching philosophy and aesthetics in northern California. There are very few paintings from this period, making Untitled exceptionally rare and desirable both in its large scale and saturated colour palette. The transformation of Adnan’s approach to abstraction at this significant point in her career is palpable on the surface of the present work, as soft geometric sequences present ideas or memories of physical places: the sea, the sun, a field or a fiery sky. As art critic Barry Schwabsky notes, “The result is a sort of geometry of landscape, always as the support for brilliant swatches of colour… her paintings reflect an inward response to nature” (Barry Schwabsky cited in: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Ed., Etel Adnan, London 2018, p.7). With an oeuvre that spans oil painting, textile works, leporello sketchbooks, drawing, watercolour, writing and poetry across sixty years, Adnan came to fame relatively late in life. The inclusion of her works in the 2012 edition of Documenta in Kassel created a sensation, and a number of career surveys and retrospectives followed at museums such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2015), Serpentine Gallery, London (2016) and more recently, the Pera Museum, Istanbul (2021). A major retrospective of Adnan’s work will open at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York this October, running through January 2022. Untitled encapsulates the exquisite beauty of Adnan’s painterly abstraction in a style that is imbued with mnemonic references to the shimmering light and landscapes of the places she has called home, among them Beirut, Paris, and the small waterfront town of Sausalito, California.

The present work is highly representative of Adnan’s meditative painterly process, which has changed little throughout her career. She consistently employs a palette knife to move paint across the surface of the canvas, never a brush, and often applies pigments directly from the tube: “When the colour comes out of the tube I don’t want to mix it, because there’s such an immediate beauty about the joy of colour” (Etel Adnan cited: Kaya Genc, ‘For Etel Adnan, a show in Turkey is a Symbolic Homecoming’, Apollo Magazine, 3 June 2021 (online)). The result is thickly worked surfaces of pigment in contrasting shapes and tones, an excavation of different landscapes of memory translated quickly and passionately to canvas. She often completes paintings in just one sitting, and this speed of execution is redolent in the movement and rhythm of paint on the surface of Untitled. Adnan’s language of abstraction draws upon a number of art historical sources, but the most important, undoubtedly, is the geometric abstraction of Paul Klee, an artist whose work Adnan had been familiar with from a young age: “Paul Klee is a painter I feel I have lived with, almost, as if I had gone to the Bauhaus. He was that central, during the ‘60s in California. In the artistic world, he was very famous. Of course the most well-known to the Americans were the Abstract Expressionists. But Paul Klee was also very present. People discussed him and quoted him, much more than any of the contemporary American painters” (Etel Adnan cited: Kaya Genc, ‘For Etel Adnan, a show in Turkey is a Symbolic Homecoming’, Apollo Magazine, 3 June 2021 (online)). The abstraction of Adnan and Klee is pertinent both visually and conceptually: Like Adnan, Klee too employed geometric abstraction to radically simplify landscapes and natural environments. Their compositions also tessellate bright blocks of colour, although Adnan’s choice of pigment is decidedly brighter and more vivid as exemplified by the brilliant chromatic saturation of Untitled.

While Adnan’s choice of vibrant colour express sent.mes nts of confidence, joy and contentment, her compositions often allude to darker themes, and the troubles of her beloved Lebanese homeland. Adnan moved back to Beirut one year before the present work was executed, at a moment when she took a job as a cultural journalist for the French-language newspaper Al-Safa. At a critical point of political turbulence throughout the Middle East region in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, Adnan’s writing boldly critiqued war and social injustice. She has written extensively about the events that unfolded in Lebanon during this period, and in turn her canvases dating between 1972 and 1976 often express notes of anguish: “Art is also a kind of language – but it’s a language of feeling. When I paint, I am happy. I am both an optimistic, happy person, and caught in and aware of tragedy. Although I lived in California most of my life, I never had a spell of t.mes where I could forget the problems of the Middle East. Every morning the newspaper would remind me” (Etel Adnan cited: Kaya Genc, ‘For Etel Adnan, a show in Turkey is a Symbolic Homecoming’, Apollo Magazine, 3 June 2021 (online)). Adnan stayed in Beirut until 1976, when she moved briefly back to Paris and then to Sausalito, making the latter her long-term home. Her acclaimed novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris the following year, a volume that won numerous awards, including the France-Pays-Arabes, and one that subsequently earned a place in the storied canon of classic war literature.

A composition powerfully evocative of Adnan’s beloved Beirut landscapes, and executed at a pivotal moment in her long and celebrated career, Untitled is a prism of luminous colour and a test.mes nt to the artist’s prowess in her chosen medium. As Adnan herself has expressed of the intersection between abstraction, landscape, nostalgia and emotion in her work, “Painting landscapes is creating cosmic events. The actual space of painting – its very dimensions – is the space of memory” (Etel Adan cited in: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Ed., Etel Adnan, London 2018, p.7).