Etel Adnan Sea and Fog

The horizon asks not to be pursued. We can’t figure out what was whistling all night long, having lost our deed of ownership for the sky. Ghosts stand as sentinels of past loves. Nature doesn’t deal with the past; nowadays, uncertainty skims its waters.

– Etel Adnan

In the book How to See by David Salle, he talks about the experience of Art and Seeing, asking very blunt questions: What is Art?

Etel Adnan was an artist, a poet, whose large retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum I was privileged to witness last year.

One of her recurrent motifs is the silent beauty of Mount Tamalpais, 15 miles north of San Francisco, where the artist was a resident since the 1950s. During her studies at the Berkley Institute, Etel could see the mountain from her window.

Humanity is an ocean, Etel said: I think I paint as I write poetry.

Etel was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925 to a Greek orthodox mother and a Muslim Turkish Ottoman officer. Her parents met in Smyrna, the Greek city on the Aegean Coast, during World War I. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Smyrna was burned to ashes, and Etel’s parents moved to Beirut, where she was born. She studied French literature, and with a passion for philosophy, Etel pursued a career in Paris, received a degree in philosophy from the University of Paris, and traveled to the United States after, to study at Berkley and Harvard University.

When I looked at her paintings, there are no human forms. Perhaps this gives her work an abstract quality. We don’t know unless we have a reference for exactly what we are looking at.

Isn’t that beautiful? It makes me go back to this blunt question: What is Art?

There is an element of mystery involved. Art evokes the sense of mystery; without it, the world would not exist. Etel was a poet, and her paintings are like old icons. We cannot reduce it to simple decoration, or what we call “eye candy.” There is substance here: depth, memory, and sensation. She worked intuitively. She never went to an art school, but she understands that to see means to arrest the world.

Etel was taking classes with Gaston Bachelard.

Bachelard would argue that imagination frees any image you can produce to be different from perceptive reality. It is anonymous from perceived reality, and it is free. The more the spirit is free, the more imagination is free. However, for adults, things become more stagnant.

Kandinsky made this beautiful alliance with music, and Adnan did the same with poetry, but it is not music; it is not listening to Schoenberg.

Etel would say: “The whole universe exists in the point.”

Where is this point? What connects us? If not merely a mystery—the moment we look and see, the moment we listen and hear.

Adnan talks about Kandinsky’s work not as abstract Art, but as an Absolute painting.

When we speak of logic, if we talk of emotions, we often forget that these two opposite instances cannot exist without one another. There are no pure feelings or pure logic. Sometimes, you are more aware of one than the other, but you cannot separate one from the other.

The poetry is magnificent, and her Art: the whole Universe that exists in the point of looking and listening.