15 Facts About Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist.

In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

Etel Adnan's mother, Rose "Lily" Lacorte, was Greek Orthodox from Smyrna and her father, Assaf Kadri, was a Sunni Muslim-Turkish, and a high-ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus, Ottoman Syria.

Etel Adnan was a top officer and former classmate of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk at the military academy.

In contrast, Etel Adnan's mother was raised in extreme poverty; her parents met in Smyrna during World War I while her father was serving as an officer in Smyrna.

Etel Adnan studied English in her youth, and most of her later work was first written in this language.

At 24, Etel Adnan traveled to Paris where she received a degree in philosophy from the University of Paris.

Etel Adnan then traveled to the United States where she continued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University.

Etel Adnan lectured at many universities throughout the United States.

Etel Adnan returned from the US to Lebanon and worked as a journalist and cultural editor for Al Safa newspaper, a French-language newspaper in Beirut.

Etel Adnan met her partner Simone Fattal in 1972 and the couple lived together until Adnan's death.

Etel Adnan died in Paris on 14 November 2021, at the age of 96.

Etel Adnan's art was very much influenced by early hurufiyya artists, including Iraqi artist Jawad Salim, Palestinian writer and artist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Iraqi painter Shakir Hassan al Said, who rejected Western aesthetics and embraced a new art form which was both modern and yet referenced traditional culture, media and techniques.

In 2017, Etel Adnan's work was included in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, a group exhibition organized by MoMA, which brought together prominent artists including Ruth Asawa, Gertrudes Altschul, Anni Albers, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape, among others.

Etel Adnan's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.