Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderArtist and poet biography

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet and painter whose work ranged across poetry, essays, painting, tapestry and fold-out books. She lived between Beirut, Paris and California, and Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco became one of her lifelong subjects.

Etel Adnan

ArtBiography

The story behind the card

Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925 to a Muslim father from Damascus and a Greek Christian mother from Smyrna, today's İzmir. She studied philosophy in Paris and the United States and taught at a college in San Rafael, California, where she began painting in the late 1950s. Mount Tamalpais, which she could see from her home in Sausalito, appears in many of her small canvases of bold colour blocks, and her 1986 book Journey to Mount Tamalpais describes that attachment. As a writer she opposed the Vietnam War in her poetry and wrote Sitt Marie Rose (1978), a novel set in the Lebanese Civil War. Wide recognition as a painter came late, after the Documenta exhibition of 2012. She died in Paris in 2021, aged 96.

Türkçe oku
Etel Adnan, Lübnan asıllı Amerikalı bir şair ve ressamdı; şiir, deneme, resim, duvar halısı ve akordeon gibi katlanan kitaplar üretti. Hayatı Beyrut, Paris ve Kaliforniya arasında geçti; San Francisco yakınlarındaki Tamalpais Dağı ömür boyu resimlerinin konusu oldu.

Adnan 1925'te Beyrut'ta, Şamlı Müslüman bir baba ile İzmirli Rum bir annenin kızı olarak doğdu. Paris'te ve Amerika'da felsefe okudu, Kaliforniya'nın San Rafael kentindeki bir kolejde ders verdi ve 1950'lerin sonunda burada resim yapmaya başladı. Sausalito'daki evinden görünen Tamalpais Dağı, canlı renk bloklarıyla kurduğu küçük tuvallerinin birçoğunda karşımıza çıkar; 1986'da yayımlanan Journey to Mount Tamalpais adlı kitabı da bu bağlılığı anlatır. Yazar olarak Vietnam Savaşı'na şiirleriyle karşı çıktı, Lübnan İç Savaşı'nda geçen Sitt Marie Rose (1978) romanını yazdı. Ressam olarak geniş ün kazanması geç, 2012'deki Documenta sergisinden sonra geldi. 2021'de Paris'te 96 yaşında öldü.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Etel Adnan
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderArt

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born artist and naturalist, painted each stage of an insect's life, from egg to caterpillar to butterfly, on the plant it fed on. Her 1705 book on the insects of Suriname joined close observation with art.

Merian was born in Frankfurt in 1647 into a family of engravers and was raising silkworms by the age of 13. In 1679 she published the first volume of a book showing how caterpillars transform. Many people then believed insects were born from mud or rotting matter, and illustrators usually drew dead specimens in tidy rows; her careful drawings of each life stage helped show that insects follow a fixed life cycle. In 1699, aged 52, she sold 255 of her own paintings to fund a voyage to the Dutch colony of Suriname with her daughter Dorothea. For nearly two years she collected and raised insects there, relying on enslaved Africans and Indigenous people for help and knowledge, until illness, possibly malaria, sent her home. Her Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) became a landmark of natural history.

Maria Sibylla MerianRead card
DriveArt

Artemisia Gentileschi, born in Rome in 1593, was one of the first women in Western Europe to build a successful career as a painter. She painted heroines from the Bible and ancient history, such as Judith and Susanna, as strong women who act, not as decorative figures to be looked at.

Artemisia trained in the workshop of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a painter influenced by Caravaggio's dramatic use of light, and finished her earliest known painting, Susanna and the Elders, at 17. In 1612 she testified at a public trial in Rome of the painter Agostino Tassi, who had assaulted her; he was found guilty. She then moved to Florence, where in 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the city's Academy of the Arts of Drawing. She later worked in Rome, Venice and Naples, and from 1638 in London at the court of Charles I. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. After her death in Naples, probably in the mid-1650s, she was largely forgotten until the Italian critic Roberto Longhi wrote about her in 1916. In 2020 the National Gallery in London gave her a major exhibition.

BritannicaRead card
DriveArt

It is often said that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard. In fact that is just his best-documented sale: the Van Gogh Museum lists several others, and he also traded many works with fellow artists.

The Red Vineyard, painted in Arles in November 1888, was shown at the exhibition of Les XX, an avant-garde artists' group in Brussels, in early 1890. The Belgian painter Anna Boch, sister of Van Gogh's friend Eugène Boch, bought it for 400 francs; it now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The Van Gogh Museum names other sales too. His first commission came from his uncle Cor, an art dealer, who ordered 19 views of The Hague to help him get started. The Paris paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy bought a painting, and his brother Theo sold another work to a gallery in London. Van Gogh also often swapped work with other artists and, when he was younger, for food or painting supplies. Exactly how many works he sold is not known. He died in July 1890, a few months after the Brussels sale.

Van Gogh MuseumRead card
DriveTrade

The Medici Bank, founded in Florence in 1397, became one of the most powerful banks in fifteenth-century Europe, and its profits paid for the Medici family's political power and its patronage of artists such as Donatello and Botticelli.

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank, and much of its profit came from handling the finances of the popes. The Church banned charging interest, so the bank earned money through bills of exchange: a merchant paid in one city and was repaid in another currency elsewhere, and the exchange rate hid the bank's fee. Under Giovanni's son Cosimo it had branches in cities including Rome, Venice, Milan, Geneva, Avignon, Bruges and London. Later managers lent heavily to rulers who could not repay, such as Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and branches closed one by one. The bank finally collapsed in 1494, the year the Medici were driven out of Florence.

Medici BankRead card
WonderBiography

Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born British architect, became in 2004 the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. Her sharply angled and flowing forms, first explored in paintings, widened what contemporary buildings could look like.

For years Hadid was called a 'paper architect': her competition entries, such as The Peak, a club planned for a Hong Kong hillside that she won in 1983, drew wide praise but were not built. She worked out her ideas in large paintings that bent perspective on purpose, treating a building less as a fixed box than as a set of forces in motion. Her first completed building, a fire station for the Vitra furniture company in Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened in 1993. As computer modelling caught up with her drawings, projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (2012) and the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympics, showed her flowing forms at full scale. She died in 2016.

Zaha HadidRead card
Next card in the archiveA suzani is a large embroidered cloth from Central Asia, traditionally made for a bride's dowry. The design was often drawn across several joined cotton strips, which were then separated so that female relatives could embroider them, and finally sewn back together.Read next →