Hans Ulrich Obrist visits Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan
‘Each visit with Etel, each encounter with Etel’s work, each reading session of her poetry gives me courage…’ – Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Etel Adnan’s career spans several decades and encompasses a wide range of media — including painting, drawing, tapestry, film, ceramics, and leporello artist books. Adnan is also an esteemed author of poetry and prose.
Inspired and moved by one of Etel Adnan’s leporellos, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist felt compelled to seek-out the nonagenarian artist, and over the years a warm friendship has flourished. In this HENI Talk, Obrist recounts his fascination with Adnan, and we get privileged access to one of their spirited conversations in her Paris home and studio.
Etel Adnan was born in 1925, in Beirut, Lebanon, and in her extraordinary trajectory of more than 95 years so far, she has created so many dimensions to her work.
When I saw the leporellos by Etel, I was struck, I was attracted, I was magnetised, and I needed to know more.
They are on the one hand very tiny, yet they can become monumental. And I was very curious, you know, who was the artist who was behind this work and started to make some research. I realised that it was the same artist who had written the amazing book about the civil war in Lebanon, Sitt Marie Rose. I realised it was the same artist and author who had written The Arab Apocalypse. I realised that not only is Etel one of the key poets of our time, playwrights of our time, but that also she was a political journalist and I found out that she was a filmmaker. So, I became so curious that I went to visit her in Paris and visited her apartment which is also her studio. And we met with her and her partner Simone Fattal and a wonderful friendship and dialogue started and really led to hundreds of visits.
I spoke a lot with Etel about Paul Klee, the great Swiss artist who like her worked in small formats, and she said that for her Paul Klee was also very important at the beginning. She once told me, and I’ve got a quote here, that ‘Klee belongs to the lineage of geniuses for whom a single designation—whether “painter”, “musician” or “architect”—is too narrow. Every painting by Klee is like an act of discovery, achieved through a process of exploration. Like a boat on the ocean,’ says Etel Adnan.
And that’s of course completely her, because you cannot put her in a box. I mean, nobody said it better than Etel’s partner, Simone Fattal – who’s also an extraordinary artist – she said that these paintings ‘exude energy’ and they function like ‘talismans’. They are in that sense very much about giving us courage. And I think in this world we do need immense courage and that is also why I keep returning to Etel, each visit with Etel, each encounter with Etel’s work, each reading session of her poetry gives me courage.
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Etel Adnan in conversation, Paris, 2019
Hans Ulrich Obrist: And what about his book? Can you tell us about this book? Illustrated by Simone Fattal.
Etel Adnan: Look at that. They are full of humour.
HUO: So, this is your table where you write, no?
EA: Yeah, it’s me writing. You know, even when I paint, I paint on the table, it comes from writing. I am used to… I was a writer basically, so the first painting I made, I cut the canvas with scissors and I put it flat like a page. I consider the canvas as a page.
HUO: How beautiful, you never told me that, that’s an amazing story. So, in a way, painting is like writing.
EA: It’s horizontal. It’s vertical in my head, but it translated from the horizontal to the vertical.
HUO: And so how do you do the paintings? Do you have an empty canvas on the table?
EA: I have all the tubes around, and I work on a flat surface. And I consider paintings as poems. They are the same. Poetry is a spirit. And it can come into anything you do.
HUO: What is poetry?
EA: It was my first opening to thinking – I had a very great professor who was a Frenchman, who was a poetry critic for La NRF [La Nouvelle Revue Français], a famous French magazine, pre-war. And he made us feel like poetry was the basis of everything – that we were born to read poetry. And that was our upbringing then. We were lucky, a great professor – it’s a miracle. It’s a great thing.
HUO: And it’s a miracle for us to listen to you. Now, Gerhard Richter says, ‘Painting is the highest form of hope’…
EA: It’s happy! It’s physical to start with. It’s like climbing a mountain, it’s a sport. Art is a sport really, very close to sport. You mentally are involved… all the inner senses that we have, all the muscles participate in art. Participate in thinking, in decision making. All the body helps, works with you.
HUO: And how do you make the decisions when you paint – is it very improvised? Or do you plan in advance the painting?
EA: No, I usually improvise – and when I don’t know what to do, I just trust myself, I just put a splash of colour or a line, and I know that will give impetus for the next move. That’s the way it goes.
HUO: Beautiful. And when is a painting finished? Because I’m always very fascinated as to when an artist decides a painting is finished.
EA: A painting is finished like a conversation is finished. You have this feeling that you said it, and that if you add, you will clutter. You will spoil what you have done. It’s instinctive, it’s instinctive. So, how is anything finished? It’s your instinct that tells you. How is a building finished? Suddenly, you know that if you add, you will encombre. So, you stop.
HUO: And talking about the building, because you are not only such an amazing artist, and poet, and painter, but you told me once that you initially wanted to be an architect…
EA: Yeah, my mother used to say this is for boys. It’s not a profession for women. There were no women architects when I was 20.
HUO: And you have an unrealised project, you told me about, of designing a house. You had an idea – you once wrote me this letter – about designing a house. Can you tell us about your architectural vision for your house?
EA: I’d love, if I had to design my house, I would like it to be surrounded with trees and to have a lot of glass windows. I like the outside to come in. I mean, a house should not be an enclosure, it should be a convenience. You have to be somewhere.
HUO: And trees are very important in your work; particularly lately, you made an amazing cycle of olive trees. Can you tell us about the idea of the olive trees?
EA: I think an olive tree is a very mysterious thing; it’s a very hard wood, and it produces oil. It’s almost a contradiction, it’s very touching – that that hard tree, which is almost a bush, and still the little olive creates that extraordinary thing. You know olive oil used to be a sacred material – they used olive oil religious ceremonies. It was very precious. The olive oil that we use so easily in salad, it is a centuries achievement that it’s so available.
EA: I would like to create the goddess of trees. We speak a lot of nature, and we lost this idea, that we had a reverence for nature. And we lost it after the Romantic period. We were awed by nature and by the phenomenon of nature, and trees are mysterious. They are friends you know. They stand, sometimes they look at you, they are that close. I really feel we need to rediscover the power of nature.
HUO: So, you once said that the Mount Tamalpais is your best friend…
EA: There is a historic background, like Cézanne’s mountain. He almost lost his mind – he came back and back and back to the mountain. Mountains are beings. Everything is a being really, if you pay attention.
HUO: You said before that you’re doing a new leporello with mountains. And do you remember when you discovered this idea of the leporello for the first time? What was the epiphany? How did you discover this amazing format of the leporello, where you bring together painting and writing?
EA: It lends itself to writing because it goes on and on. So, the first leporello, I used poems on it. And in fact, in Japan and in China they were books. People opened up and read them, and then closed them and put them back in the drawer – they’d have nothing on their walls. Today they turn their back on the leporello. For them, it’s an old-fashioned art form.
HUO: And how did you discover it?
EA: I remember I entered a Japanese store, in San Francisco there is Japan Town, a whole section in middle of the city of Japanese stores. And, Simone and I, we entered to look at ceramic plates and I discovered unpainted leporellos and I immediately thought: ‘writing’. It awakened an immediate desire to write. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I can write poetry on these things.’ And later, in the museums – San Francisco has fine Adriatic Art museums – I saw big leporellos, huge ones. And the Japanese and the Chinese for a while drew landscapes on them.
What’s nice about leperellos is that it goes on and on. It enlargens, it opens up.
HUO: We looked before at your wonderful drawings for ceramics. Can you tell us about these ceramic walls? How these ideas came about?
EA: I studied Greek Art. What we call ‘Greek drawings’ are on vases, on ceramics. Ceramic has been a support for drawing – in Persian art, as well as in Ancient Greek art.
HUO: And this idea of going into architecture, doing big walls, it’s something you always wanted to do, no? To do public art?
EA: I like public art because I feel it is a gift to the public. That’s the importance of architecture. You can be poor and miserable but if you walk in a nice neighbourhood you get an uplift. It’s really social art. It’s a big contribution to the life of a community, a great architectural piece. It is a cadeux to the public.
HUO: That’s a beautiful conclusion – I have one very last question. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this little book which is an Advice to a Young Poet – I wanted to ask you, again, what would be your advice to a young artist or a young poet?
EA: My advice would be not to be afraid to be audacious, to take risks, that is important. To go ahead and have confidence and not be afraid, it’s very important.
With thanks to
Galerie Lelong & Co.
Serpentine Galleries
Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut
Simone Fattal
Archive
Getty Images
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Tate
Credits
Sans titre (detail)
Etel Adnan, 2014
Oil on canvas
9 7/16 x 11 13/16 in
31074/W18465
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Untitled (detail)
Etel Adnan, 2014
Oil on canvas
9 7/16 x 11 13/16 in
30649/W18063
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Sans titre (detail)
Etel Adnan, 2014
Oil on canvas
10 5/8 x 13 13/16 in
32059/W18224
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Untitled (detail)
Etel Adnan, 2014
Oil on canvas
9 5/8 x 11 7/16 in
32600/W18125
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Le poids du monde 36
Etel Adnan, 2019
Oil on canvas
13 x 9 7/16 in
33354/W21888
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Le poids du monde 30
Etel Adnan, 2017
Oil on canvas
13 x 9 7/16 in
32570/W19974
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Le poids du monde 19
Etel Adnan, 2016
Oil on canvas
12 3/16 x 9 7/8 in
31653/W19444
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Etel Adnan At Home and In Her Studio Workshop, 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Etel Adnan At Home and In Her Studio Workshop (WS), 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World
Installation view (Details of Mahmoud Darwish leporello)
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2 June – 11 September 2016)
Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones
Etel Adnan At Home and In Her Studio Workshop (with Leporello), 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Night
Etel Adnan, 2017
Gouache and inkwash painting on paper
Book: 5 15/16 x 3 9/16 / Length: 93 3/4 in
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Etel Adnan, Paris, 2017
Courtesy of HENI
Etel Adnan’s Home and Studio Workshop (Dining Table), 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Etel Adnan’s Studio Workshop, 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Etel Adnan At Home and In Her Studio Workshop (Background desk), 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Etel Adnan’s painting desk, 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Paul Klee, portrait of the German / Swiss artist & painter at his Bauhaus Studio in Weimar, Germany, 1924
Culture Club / Getty Images
Rocky coastline
Paul Klee, 1931
Leemage / UIG / Getty Images
Castle and Sun
Paul Klee, 1928
Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images
Paul Klee
MTI / Getty Images
Ad Parnassum
Paul Klee, 1932
Alinari Archives / CORBIS / Getty Images
Polyphony
Paul Klee, 1932
DeAgostini / Getty Images
Fool in Trance (Narr in Trance)
Paul Klee, 1929
Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images
The Pyramid Clown
Paul Klee, 1929
Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images
Etel Adnan at her painting desk, 2015
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Le poids de la lune 14
Etel Adnan, 2018
Oil on canvas
13 x 9 7/16 in
33116/W20977
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Le poids du monde 33
Etel Adnan, 2017
Oil on canvas
13 x 9 7/16 in
32901/W19977
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Planète 2
Etel Adnan, 2019
Oil on canvas
13 x 9 7/16 in
W21963
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Beyrouth
Etel Adnan, 1964-65
Oil on canvas
19 7/8 x 22 1/16 in
W19754
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World, Installation view at the Serpentine Gallery
Tristan Fewings / Getty Images
Etel Adnan at her painting desk, 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Etel Adnan at her painting desk II, 2016
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Etel Adnan reading, Paris, 2017
Courtesy of HENI
Etel Adnan sketching, Paris, 2017
Courtesy of HENI
Etel Adnan at the table, 2015
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Etel Adnan surveying her paintings, Paris, 2017
Courtesy of HENI
Etel Adnan contemplating her paintings, Paris, 2017
Courtesy of HENI
Forêt II
Etel Adnan, 2015
Ink and watercolour on Japan paper
cahier: 9 7/8 x 4 5/16 / longueur: 107 9/16 in
W19690
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
L’Olivier
Etel Adnan, 2019
Wool tapestry
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Edition 1/3
78 13/16 x 55 3/16 in
W21385
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Les oliviers I
Etel Adnan, 2019
Pencil and ink on booklet
Book : 7 1/16 x 4 3/4 / Length : 109 1/8 in
W21366
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Jardins 17
Etel Adnan, 2018
Oil on canvas
Diamètre 11 13/16 in
W21278
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Fleurs
Etel Adnan, 2017
Ink on paperboard
12 7/16 x 9 7/16 in
W20709
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Mont Sainte-Victoire
Paul Cézanne, ca. 1902–06
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(CC0 1.0)
Paul Cézanne, Montagne Sainte Victoire, 1905–06
Tate (N05303)
digital image © Tate
released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
Montagne Sainte-Victoire 2
Etel Adnan, 1990
Pencil and watercolor on paper
9 1/4 x 12 5/8 in
W19847
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Mont Tamalpaïs I
Etel Adnan, 1989
Pencil and watercolor on paper
9 7/16 x 12 7/16 in
32541/W20699
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Mont Tamalpaïs
Etel Adnan, 1970 / 2018
Wool tapestry
Edition of 3 + 1 AP, edition 1/1 AP
63 1/16 x 78 13/16 in
33345/W20722
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Mont Tamalpaïs II
Etel Adnan, 2019
Ceramic
87 4/4 x 82 1/8 in
W21654
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World, Installation view at the Serpentine Gallery
Tristan Fewings / Getty Images
Paysage
Etel Adnan, 1989
Chinese ink on paper
Book: 6 5/16 x 3 9/16 / Length: 76 13/16 in
W21936
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Etel Adnan at her painting desk, 2015
Catherine Panchout / Sygma / Getty Images
Signs
Etel Adnan, 2018
Ink on paper
11 7/16 x 3 3/4 ; longueur du livret : 208 13/16 in
W21164
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World, Installation view at the Serpentine Gallery (Leporello)
Tristan Fewings / Getty Images
Signs
Etel Adnan, 2018
Inkwash painting and purple ink on paper
Book : 7 1/16 x 4 3/4 / Length : 102 7/16 in
W2194
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World
Installation view, Untitled (Study for le soleil amoureux de la lune), 2014
Ceramic
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2 June – 11 September 2016)
Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones
Morning
Etel Adnan, 2019
Ceramic
63 1/16 x 78 13/16 in
W21887
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Mont Tamalpaïs II
Etel Adnan, 2019
Ceramic
87 4/4 x 82 1/8 in
W21654
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Untitled
Etel Adnan, 2019
Installation view, Special Olympics, Abu Dhabi Corniche
Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg
The New Sun of the Aztecs
Etel Adnan, 2017
Installation view, Sonora 128, Mexico City
Courtesy of the artist, kurimanzutto Mexico City, and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg
Photo by PJ Rountree
Etel Adnan contemplating her paintings, Paris, 2017
Courtesy of HENI
Music
Readers! Do You Read?
Chris Zabriskie, 2012
FMA, (CC BY 4.0)
‘Etel Adnan’, Official website
‘Etel Adnan’, Galerie Lelong
Gareth Harris, ‘Etel Adnan: This is the summit of my career’, The Art Newspaper, 13th June 2018
‘Etel Adnan’, Poetry Foundation
D.T. Max, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Curator Who Never Sleeps’, New Yorker, 1st December 2014
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