Google is celebrating the legacy of late Lebanese American writer and painter Etel Adnan with an illustration on its homepage.
The artwork—from the series known as Google Doodles—depicts the artist at her desk, paintbrush in hand, framed by the fruit of her 50-year-long career:
painted interpretations of the sun, sea, and mountains as jewel-toned geometries; and a prodigious body of writing on the legacy of war, national and diasporic identity, and feminism in the Arabic-speaking world.
“Etel Adnan inspired all of those fortunate to have met her in person. She taught us how important memory is without nostalgia and made physical in words and images beauty rendered from the light and darkness of the 20th and 21st century,” Mary Sabbatino, vice president and partner at Galerie Lelong, Adnan’s longtime representation told ARTnews upon her death in 2021, at age 96.
“As another poet wrote, ‘Stop all clocks, she’s dead,'” Sabatino added.
Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925, and he began painting in the 1960s while teaching aesthetics and philosophy at a university in Northern California.
In the 1970s and her 1980s, she published several books of poetry and essays, as well as the acclaimed novel Sitt Marie Rose. The book is based on the true story of Marie-Rose Boulot, who was kidnapped and murdered by a Lebanese militia for supporting the Palestinian cause during the Lebanese civil war.
It wasn’t until 2012, when curator Carolyn Kristoff-Bakargiev included her in her Documenta Her 13, that her contemplative abstraction gained institutional acceptance.
In 2014, she participated in the Whitney Biennial and later that year received France’s highest cultural honor, the Order of Arts and Letters.
New York’s Guggenheim Museum will hold one of the first major exhibitions of her work in the United States in 2021, titled “Etel Adnan: A New Measure of Light,” featuring paintings, ceramics, an accordion-style artist book, Tapestries and other items were exhibited.
In her 2014 interview with Bomb Magazine, Adnan reflected on the delayed recognition of her visual art: It’s great to see her work recognized, but it’s almost a fad for a woman to be recognized so late in her life. For example, Agnes Martin. This is a trend, but I hope it changes. ”
