Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, for I am going to talk to you about an artist who shook up our aesthetic certainties with the power of a Californian earthquake, but whose late recognition reminds us of our own collective blindness. Etel Adnan, this extraordinary woman, died at 96 years old in Paris in 2021, lived several simultaneous lives, navigating between cultures, languages, and forms of expression with a freedom that makes us pale with envy.
Adnan’s story is one of a life woven with threads of exile and returns, between Beyrouth, Paris, Sausalito in California and elsewhere. But reducing this artist to her journey is like claiming to grasp the ocean in a glass of water. In her paintings, her accordion books, her tapestries, there is a dazzling clarity that has few equivalents in contemporary art. A contained energy that paradoxically produces a sensation of immensity.
What an astonishing life she led before the art world deigned to notice her! It took until Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012 for this octogenarian to receive the attention she had deserved for decades. What a shame for our Western artistic institutions to have ignored this major talent for so long! Were your eyes obstructed by so many prejudices, ladies and gentlemen curators?
What strikes us in Adnan’s painterly work is this ability to condense a world into a miniature format. Her paintings, often no larger than a book cover, possess an intensity that defies their modest size. With her spatula never a brush she applies generous layers of pure colors that she juxtaposes in simple geometric shapes. No mixing, no hesitation. Only the categorical affirmation of a presence.
The Phenomenological Experience of Color
Look closely at her paintings: these rectangles of vibrant colors, these triangles that evoke mountains, these solar disks suspended in skies of abyssal depth… There is something there that escapes pure abstraction without ever tipping into conventional figuration. It is in this tension that the strength of Adnan’s works resides.
“Color is the expression of the will to power of matter”, she said in 2023, inspired by Nietzsche [1]. This sentence perfectly summarizes her aesthetic philosophy. For Adnan, colors are not mere visual attributes, but quasi-living entities, endowed with their own power. They do not represent the world; they are the world in its most fundamental intensity.
This phenomenological conception of color finds its roots in her philosophical training. A student at the Sorbonne, Adnan attended the lectures of Gaston Bachelard and Étienne Souriau. The influence of phenomenology, this philosophical current interested in the way phenomena appear to consciousness, is evident in her work. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate position-taking, it is the background against which all acts stand out” [2]. Adnan’s paintings embody this perceptual consciousness in its purest state.
Her rectangles of color are not arbitrary; they result from a direct, almost visceral perception of the world. They are less representations than recordings of experienced events. When she paints Mount Tamalpais, this Californian mountain that she considered her “best friend”, she does not seek to reproduce its appearance, but to capture the sensation it provokes, the effect it produces on consciousness.
It is astonishing to see how this philosophical approach to color defies our conventional expectations. Adnan’s hues possess an inner luminosity that owes nothing to effects of light or shadow. Each color exists for itself, in its ontological fullness. This autonomy of color recalls Wittgenstein’s reflections on the impossibility of defining colors other than through direct experience. We are faced here with the ineffable, that which cannot be translated into words.
Philosophers have long disserted on the relationship between perception and consciousness, but few artists have succeeded in materializing this questioning with as much clarity as Adnan. Her canvases are not illustrations of philosophical concepts; they are philosophical acts in themselves, visual meditations on the nature of experience.
When you look at an Adnan painting, you are not facing an image; you are immersed in a perceptual event. The experience is not passive, it engages you entirely. Her colors grab you, force you to reconsider your own relation to the visible. They remind you that seeing is never a neutral act, but always an active participation in the world.
This phenomenological dimension of her work explains in part why her paintings resist reproduction so well. Seeing them online or in a book is not enough; one must be in their presence to fully feel their impact. Their modest format creates an intimacy that contradicts the immensity they evoke a paradox that constitutes one of the most fascinating aspects of her work.
Poetry and Memory: Leporellos as Cartography of Displacement
If Adnan’s painting captivates with its immediacy, her leporellos (these accordion books inspired by the Japanese tradition) reveal another dimension of her talent. These hybrid works, halfway between book and painting, between writing and drawing, constitute a form of poetic cartography of displacement.
Poetry has always been at the heart of Adnan’s artistic journey. Even before dedicating herself to painting, she was already a recognized poet and writer, the author of texts as powerful as Sitt Marie Rose or The Arab Apocalypse. In her leporellos, these two aspects of her creativity converge in a striking way. Writing becomes visual, and drawing narrative.
Jorge Luis Borges, that other great explorer of the frontiers between languages and cultures, wrote: “A book is not an isolated object: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations” [3]. Adnan’s leporellos perfectly embody this conception. They are not mere supports of expression, but spaces of relation, places where connections are woven between worlds usually separated.
When Adnan inscribes Arabic poems in her leporellos, intertwined with ink drawings and watercolors, she does not merely juxtapose two forms of expression; she creates a dialogue between them. Arabic writing, with its calligraphic fluidity, becomes drawing itself, while the colored traits that accompany it acquire a narrative dimension.
What is particularly interesting in these works is the way they embody cultural memory. Adnan, who did not master Arabic well enough to write it fluently, transcribed poems by other Arab authors. This seemingly simple gesture reveals a deep reflection on identity and belonging. By copying these texts in a language she did not fully possess, she reactivated a cultural heritage while recognizing her distance from it.
As Edward Said noted in his reflections on exile, “most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions” [4]. Adnan’s leporellos precisely materialize this “awareness of simultaneous dimensions”. They are threshold-objects, border-works that refuse to belong to a single world.
The act of unfolding implied by reading a leporello is itself significant. Unlike the traditional book, where the passage from one page to another implies a rupture, the leporello unfolds in a continuum. This physical continuity reflects the way Adnan conceived memory: not as a collection of isolated moments, but as an uninterrupted flow of experiences that transform each other.
Adnan compared leporellos to journeys, to rivers that one travels up or down [5]. This fluvial metaphor is particularly enlightening. A river is never static; it is in perpetual motion, while retaining its identity. Similarly, Adnan’s leporellos capture the flux of consciousness, its meanders and currents, without ever freezing it.
The temporal dimension is also major in these works. Unlike a painting, which can be apprehended in a single glance, a leporello imposes a sequential reading. There is a before and an after, a unfolding that mimics that of thought or speech. This intrinsic temporality makes leporellos profoundly poetic objects, in the sense that poetry is always an experience of time.
Borges, again, wrote that “time is the substance I am made of” [6]. Adnan’s leporellos remind us that our identity is not a fixed essence, but a temporal construction, a complex weaving of experienced moments, memories, and anticipations. They are memory-objects that preserve not only contents, but also rhythms, pauses, accelerations.
This conception of memory as a dynamic process rather than a static archive is particularly relevant for understanding the diasporic experience. For someone like Adnan, whose identity was forged through multiple displacements, memory is not so much a question of fidelity to the past as a constant negotiation between different cultural worlds.
Leporellos bear witness to this negotiation. They are spaces of translation, not in the strict linguistic sense, but in the broader sense of passage between different systems of signs and references. They remind us that all identity is necessarily translative, that it involves a constant work of interpretation and reinterpretation.
What distinguishes Adnan’s leporellos from mere formal exercises is precisely this existential dimension. They are not merely aesthetic objects, but ways of inhabiting the world, of giving it meaning despite or perhaps because of its fragmented and multiple character.
Memory, in Adnan, is never nostalgic. It does not idealize a lost past, does not fantasize about an impossible return. It is rather a creative power that allows the present to be constantly reconfigured. Her leporellos are acts of resistance against forgetting, but also against identity fixation.
In her essay on cultural memory, Aleida Assmann writes that “remembering is an act of semiotization” [7]. Adnan’s leporellos perfectly illustrate this idea. They transform lived experience into signs, but signs that preserve something of the vitality and contingency of experience itself.
The strength of the leporellos resides precisely in their refusal of monumentalization. Unlike the large installations that often dominate contemporary art, these modest works invite an intimate, almost tactile relationship. They do not impose themselves on the viewer; they invite a patient deciphering, an attentive reading.
This tactile quality is essential to understand Adnan’s approach. In a world increasingly dominated by digital images and their infinite reproducibility, her leporellos affirm the importance of materiality, of direct contact, of physical presence. They remind us that memory is not only cognitive, but also corporeal.
Far from being mere formal curiosities, Adnan’s leporellos thus constitute a deep reflection on the questions of identity, memory, and displacement. They invite us to rethink these notions no longer in terms of essence or origin, but in terms of process, translation, and relation.
The Ethics of Joyful Resistance
Adnan’s late recognition represents much more than a mere injustice finally repaired – it testifies above all to the essential perseverance of certain artistic voices that refuse to disappear in an often amnesiac and opportunistic art world. For Adnan never ceased to create, indifferent to fashions and market trends. This constancy is not blind obstinacy, but fidelity to a vision.
What is also fascinating in her journey is this ability to transform the wounds of History into a vital affirmation. At 96 years old, she continued to paint canvases radiating energy, as if age had only reinforced her creative intensity.
When she declares in 2020 that she would prefer “to have 10 Palestinians with doctorates rather than 10 dead Israelis” [8], she reminds us that her political commitment has never disappeared, but has been transformed. From the incandescent rage of The Arab Apocalypse to the luminous meditations of her later years, it is the same spirit that animates her work: an tireless search for truth and beauty in a torn world.
Adnan’s trajectory teaches us a precious lesson: true art is not that which shouts the loudest, but that which persists with inflexible integrity. In an artistic landscape often dominated by the spectacular and the ephemeral, her small incandescent canvases remind us that greatness can nestle in apparent modesty.
Do not be fooled: behind the apparent simplicity of Adnan’s paintings hides a vertiginous complexity, the fruit of a lifetime of thought and experience. Her mountains and suns are not mere decorative motifs, but cosmic presences, incarnations of that primordial energy that she never ceased to track in her writings as in her paintings.
Ultimately, what Etel Adnan offers us is an art that reconciles what our era tends to separate: political commitment and creative joy, intellectual rigor and the sensuality of colors, cultural rootedness and openness to the world. An art that refuses false alternatives and affirms the possibility of fullness.
- Adler, Laure. “Beginning with Color: An Interview with Etel Adnan.” The Paris Review, October 4, 2023.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
- Borges, Jorge Luis. Enquetes. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
- Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Arles: Actes Sud, 2008.
- Coxhead, Gabriel. “Etel Adnan (1925–2021)”, Apollo Magazine, November 15, 2021.
- Borges, Jorge Luis. “A New Refutation of Time”, in Other Inquisitions. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
- Adnan, Etel. Interview with Charles Bernstein. The Brooklyn Rail, February 2021.
- Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
