Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American artist and writer whose small, vivid landscape paintings won wide acclaim late in her life. Born in Beirut in 1925, she spent decades known mainly as a poet and essayist before her bright, blocky paintings reached a broad audience. Working often with a palette knife, she built glowing little scenes of mountains, sun, and sea from simple planes of pure color.

Many of her paintings return to Mount Tamalpais in California, a peak she loved and painted over and over. Her work has a warm, direct simplicity, closer to feeling than to detail. Adnan gained international recognition in her eighties and nineties, and by the time of her death in 2021 she was celebrated as a singular voice in both art and literature.