“Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure” has to be the most genteel exhibition of art the Guggenheim has ever mounted. Not the most over-hyped; not the worst. Unlike the museum’s recently concluded show of photographs by Deanna Lawson, “Light’s New Measure” avoids overt politics. Nor does it place an emphasis on pictorial innovation like the concurrent show devoted to the pioneering abstractionist Vasily Kandinsky. The Adnan exhibition is just . . . mild. There’s no sin in that. Were contemporary artists inclined more toward gentility than provocation we might be better off. And Adnan’s art—the paintings, in particular; the tapestries, ditto; the videos, not at all—bears suitable merit to invite pause. Pause over what, you might ask? The vagaries of reputation, for one; the primacy of the painted mark, for another. The museum touts Adnan’s work as “an intensely personal distillation of her faith in the human spirit and the beauty of the natural world”—boilerplate PR, you might say, but it’s to the credit of Adnan’s color-saturated pictures that they capture some of that optimism.
Occupying the bottom two rungs of the Guggenheim’s rotunda, “Light’s New Measure” is the first of three exhibitions organized in conjunction with the aforementioned “Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle,” an array of paintings and works on paper culled from the permanent collection. (The other shows will feature the artists Jennie C. Jones and Cecilia Vicuña.) Katherine Brinson, the Daskalopoulos Curator of Contemporary Art, and Lauren Hinkson, an associate curator, have set out to establish commonalities between Adnan and Kandinsky, painters who “explore the potential of abstract form.” Locating a shared purpose between artists living and dead is to be applauded, particularly at a cultural moment in which history is vilified or distorted—that is, when it’s acknowledged at all. Kandinsky would have approved of Adnan’s likening abstraction to music—Kandinsky insisted, after all, that color could convey sound—as well as the goal of creating “depth of meaning that has nothing to do with words.” Great minds think alike, right?
Adnan’s partner, the sculptor Simone Fattal, extols the work as being reminiscent of icons or talismans, intimating that the paintings embody visionary longings. The pairing with Kandinsky would seem to reinforce the point. At the risk of indulging in semantic nitpickery, let me say that the paintings featured in “Light’s New Measure” aren’t talismanic or iconic. They’re grounded and concrete, predicated, as they are, on specific motifs and spatial relationships gleaned from observed experience. The basis for several of the pictures is Mount Tamalpais, a distinctive peak in the Marin Hills near Adnan’s home in Sausalito, California. Divining mystical portent from the landscape is an age-old pursuit. But notwithstanding some coloristic liberties, Adnan is less a mystic and something closer to a classicist. Structure is her bread and butter. She’s more in the spirit of Nicolas Poussin and Georges Seurat than Caspar David Friedrich or George Inness. A cynic might be forgiven for wondering if some of this supernatural heavy-breathing is an attempt to poach upon the afterglow of Hilma af Klint—the subject of a recent and hugely popular exhibition at the Guggenheim. Now there was a visionary. Adnan’s lack of hocus pocus is, in point of comparison, straight talk. Strong-arming the paintings in the service of their antithesis is the curatorial equivalent of fake news.
Adnan has lived life as a true multiculturalist. She was born in Beirut in 1925. Her father was a Syrian-born military officer in the Ottoman Empire and a non-practicing Muslim, her mother a practicing member of the Greek Orthodox Church. Adnan learned Turkish and Greek at home; in school, she was taught French. After studying philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, Adnan traveled to the United States to attend Berkeley and Harvard. After teaching at Dominican University of California from 1958 to 1972, Adnan returned to Lebanon to work as a journalist. She fled to Paris at the onset of the Civil War. That conflict served as backdrop for Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, a novel based on Marie Rose Boulos, a Syrian social worker who was executed by the Christian militia. The book went on to win a prize from the Association de solidarité franco-arabe but remains Adnan’s only prose work. Poetry is her primary literary focus. Included at the Guggenheim is Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut (1968), an accordion book that features the title poem as well as a surrounding array of watercolor drawings. “I write what I see,” the artist has stated, and “paint what I am.”
And what is Adnan? A ninety-six-year-old dab hand at buttery surfaces and ramshackle geometries, a genial temperament with a tart and sunny palette. Her canvases are small and simple: a few snug forms cobbled together and animated by gently bumptious rhythms. Adnan’s chock-a-block shapes and rich impasto have earned comparisons to Nicolas de Staël; her nudgy insistence on contour recalls Serge Poliakoff. A few years back, Adnan’s art was exhibited alongside that of Paul Klee—a pairing that is, on the whole, more propitious given Adnan’s off-kilter compositions and quirky distillations of shape. An untitled canvas from 1983—a centrifugal composition of staccato marks punctuated by cool greens and anchored by a clarifying white—is Adnan at her most engaging. When she settles for less—a line here, a circle there, a cursory swipe of pigment—the results are not more. The attendant tapestries benefit from an increase in scale, and, with that, greater complexity and dynamism. It’s worth mulling over whether collaboration—in this case, with various weavers—benefits a poet for whom painting is a happy sideline. Isolation can, after all, be limiting. Let’s hope Adnan invites more guests to the studio in the coming years. In the meantime, “Light’s New Measure” provides an amiable enough entry into one of the myriad outskirts of contemporary culture.
(c) 2021 Mario Naves
This review appeared in the December 2021 edition of The New Criterion.
Too Much Art 