Etel Adnan
Began painting in her thirties, was ignored for fifty years and became an art-world star at eighty-seven
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut to a Greek mother from Smyrna and a Syrian father who had been an officer in the Ottoman army. At home they spoke Greek and Turkish; at her French convent school, French; on the street, Arabic. She won a scholarship to the Sorbonne, studied philosophy there and then at Berkeley and Harvard, and from 1958 taught it at a small Catholic college in California for fourteen years.
She had always written poetry in French. When the Algerian war of independence began, she found she could no longer bear to write in the language of the army fighting it, and turned instead to a small box of pastels a colleague had lent her. She later said she had begun to paint in Arabic. Her pictures were small, quick and unfashionable: flat squares of colour laid down with a palette knife, and, again and again, the outline of Mount Tamalpais, which she could see from her window.
Her writing found readers first. Sitt Marie Rose, a short novel about a woman murdered during the Lebanese civil war, was published in 1978 and became a set text. The paintings sat in her flat. Then in 2012 the curator of Documenta, the vast contemporary art show in Kassel, included a room of them. She was 87. Museums and galleries around the world followed, as if she had appeared from nowhere.
She lived in Paris with her partner of many decades, the artist Simone Fattal, and died there in 2021, aged 96.