Lenbachhaus Munich: exhibition by Etel Adnan – culture

Etel Adnan’s art wants to be at home everywhere. She feeds on Arabic ornaments and American color field painting, on Asian leporellos and on Christian icons. It can be connected in North and South, in the Arabic region as well as in the West and in Japan. But Adnan’s works definitely belong in Munich, in the Lenbachhaus. Because their playful, crooked and sun-tanned geometries, applied with a broad brush, inherit Paul Klee’s and Wassily Kandinsky’s pictorial inventions, which hang in the municipal art museum here. Some can also be seen in the show.

The comparison also shows the differences to the models. The daughter of a Syrian-Greek couple who grew up in Beirut was not blinded by the southern light like Klee was on his trip to Tunis in 1914. It just belongs to her, to her thinking and feeling. A lot of yellow and orange can be seen, overall the colors appear bright, luminous and clearly separated from each other. Adnan doesn’t shy away from pastel shades either. And unlike Kandinsky, she doesn’t wallow in ever new swirls of color in a single composition. She doesn’t have the space for that: Adnan’s paintings are mostly only the size of a handbag. The squares, circles, hills and horizons rearrange themselves again and again from picture to picture, set in motion as soon as you walk down the long rows of these small formats. Adnan doesn’t wallow in the storm of forms, she concentrates.

Massive painting dripping with artist ego? Etel Adnan takes a different approach

Adnan was still involved in the preparation of the Munich exhibition, her first major solo show in Germany. She died last November at the age of 96, a decade after her international breakthrough at Documenta 13. At the time, the general public in Europe discovered Etel Adnan not only as an author but also as an artist far too late. Which also has to do with the fact that she doesn’t live up to some clichés about abstract art: Her paintings don’t come across as powerful, not in big swings, dripping with artist ego. In contrast to many colleagues, Adnan does not simply claim that his own abstraction is a universally understandable world language. A cosmopolitan from a migrant family, she truly thinks and feels in a number of different languages ​​and cultures at once, circling them, mixing them, eluding them again.

She, who was first and foremost a writer, suffered from being very familiar with Greek, Turkish, French and later English, but not having made it to a recognized poet in Arabic. So she experimented visually with the characters, integrating them into leporellos and drawings. During the Algerian War in particular, she became more and more alienated from the old colonial power France and has wanted to escape from the French ever since. But it wasn’t that easy. The Lebanese newspaper, whose culture department Adnan in Beirut ran before the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, also appeared in French.

Open detailed view

Art saved her from all these entanglements, including those within the Arab world to which she felt she belonged. It was only in front of the easel that Adnan distanced himself from day-to-day politics, becoming more fundamental, searching for the nature of the sun, moon and mountains. An encounter in Beirut may have contributed to the decision to leave the typewriter behind for the palette more and more: It was here that Adnan met and fell in love with the Syrian-born artist Simone Fattal, and their partnership lasted until Adnan’s death.

For the couple, migration meant always throwing themselves into new things – unlike Adnan’s parents, who in Beirut long mourned the loss of today’s Izmir, from which they left after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. The daughter threw herself into the roaring jazz scene in California, but then turned Mount Tamalpais into an almost mythical protagonist of her art. And she designed carpets, many of which could only be woven in the last years of her life for financial reasons.

As a result, Adnan’s artistic oeuvre had to appear familiar and at the same time completely unknown to an audience trained in the avant-garde. For a long time, the Western art scene was unable to experience such irritation as something enriching. Today – more precisely: since Okwui Enwezor’s international Documenta 11 in 2002 – things are different. In the Lenbachhaus you think: why so late?

Etel Adnan. Lenbach house Munich, until February 26, 2022. The catalog (Hirmer) costs 29.90 euros.