Untitled, 2014

Oil on canvas
© Etel Adnan; courtesy the artist.

The celebrated poet, essayist, and visual artist Etel Adnan left Beirut in 1949 to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris on a scholarship. A few years later, she moved to the United States for graduate studies in philosophy at UC Berkeley and Harvard, before arriving in Sausalito, California, in 1958, to teach at Dominican College in San Rafael. She then began to paint; the view out her window of Mount Tamalpais became a recurrent inspiration for many decades. Renderings of the mountain as an abstract, mutable, and vibrantly colored form appear across her oil paintings on small canvases, such as Untitled. Adnan considered herself primarily a painter, despite being well known as the author of more than a dozen books in English. “I wouldn’t say American,” she told a journalist in 2018. “The colors I use, the brightness—they are the colors of California.”