Etel Adnan, celebrated writer who found late-in-life fame as a painter, dies at 96

For more than half a century, Etel Adnan pursued dual vocations, writing novels, poems and essays that grappled with war and history, even as she made paintings, tapestries and ceramic sculptures that reflected her love of nature and the cosmos. “It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am,” she once said.

Adnan, a Lebanese American who grew up in Beirut and spent decades in the Bay Area, was a celebrated author who found late-in-life fame as an artist. An exhibition of her work opened last month at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, showcasing what New York Times art critic Roberta Smith once described as her “stubbornly radiant abstractions.” Her paintings were small but evocative, filled with vivid depictions of the sun, sea and Mount Tamalpais, a rocky peak overlooking San Francisco.

“It’s so rare that you have someone making such important contributions to poetry and art,” Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, said in a 2015 interview with the Wall Street Journal. He called Adnan

“one of the most influential artists of the 21st century,” adding: “Her work is the opposite of cynicism. It is pure oxygen in a world full of wars.”

MAdnan was 96 when she died Nov. 14 at her home in Paris. She had a heart ailment, said artist Simone Fattal, her longtime partner and sole immediate survivor.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut on Feb. 24, 1925. Her father, a Syrian Muslim, had commanded Ottoman troops as a senior army officer in World War I; her mother, who was Greek Orthodox, was a homemaker.