A review
Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure, on view at the Guggenheim Museum, presents four dozen abstract paintings that explore the changing body of form as it is seen through the figure-ground dynamic and experienced through changing perspectives. Adnan’s compositions are mostly small-scale, posing not only an irony but also a curatorial challenge to evenly fill the museum’s expansive walls.
Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek mother and Syrian father, Etel Adnan received her education in French schools and became a writer who was fluent in Arabic, French and Greek. After studying Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, Adnan moved to America in 1955. However her life changed during the Algerian War of Independence that had begun in 1954 and ended in 1962. Although she lived in the US for most of those war years, she could not escape the knowledge of violence and decided to no longer write in French. Instead she became a painter, while teaching philosophy at the Dominican College of San Rafael in California.
