The Etel Adnan Endowment Fund

The Etel Adnan Endowment Fund

The Society is delighted that the respected writer, philosopher, poet and much loved visual artist Etel Adnan chose to give the Society a permanent endowment of 250,000 Euros before her death in Paris on 14th November 2021 at the age of 96. Her paintings, drawings, poems and tapestries are recognised as possessing a power of expression that transcends time.

Etel was Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. Her father Assaf Kadri Beik was born in Damascus in a distinguished military family. He travelled very young – without his family’s consent – to Constantinople to join the Military Academy directed by his uncle. Ataturk was a fellow student and their friendship lasted until Kadri Bey returned to Syria. Assaf Kadri was an officer in the État-Major, and along with Ataturk and other officers he helped plan the Battle of the Dardanelles. Wounded on the head during the battle, he became Military commander of Smyrna. There he met a beautiful Greek young girl, Rose Lily Lacorte, whom he married.

The couple left Smyrna after the big 1922 fire and settled in Beirut, where Etel was born soon after. She was educated in French convent schools in a primarily Arabic speaking country, speaking herself mostly Turkish and Greek at home, Turkish being the common language of her parents, and her mother teaching her Greek – which language she never forgot.

Etel attended the École des Lettres in Beirut. She was granted a scholarship which allowed her to continue her philosophical studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. She continued her graduate studies in America at UC Berkeley and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972 she was a professor of the philosophy of art and humanities at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael. In 1972 she went back to Lebanon.

Prior to becoming known for her visual work Etel was a prolific writer; both as a front page journalist and respected political commentator at al Safa, the French Lebanese newspaper, and as a celebrated novelist and poet. An articulate witness to the horror of war, two of her best-known books are Sitt Marie Rose (1978) and The Arab Apocalypse (1989). Etel’s creativity overflowed into the visual arts. In 2022, shortly after her death, the Introduction to her exhibition at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, noted: “As the years pass, many people will be touched by her art, in the same way as the work of Vincent van Gogh, with whom her work has significant affinity, is still admired around the world today.”

Etel was introduced to the work of Ibn ‘Arabi by her longtime life partner, the Damascus born publisher and artist Simone Fattal. Etel recalled that in the 1980s she read ‘in one breath’ The Twenty-Nine Pages. In expressing what intrigued her about Ibn ‘Arabi she explained: “I feel that his thought is very close, as a procedure of the mind, to oriental music – the music of Ali Akbar Khan, or Arabic classical music, which is based on theme and variation. There is a basic theme in Ibn ‘Arabi with infinite little variations. He is like a man who turns around a point, a pole, to which he constantly returns. This pole he calls God… Or you could say that he is like somebody that a wave brings to the shore, and then the same wave takes him back, and then brings him in again, and so on. The wave keeps rolling, and every rolling is a new experience of what is maybe the same thing.”

While living in Sausalito, Etel developed a particular fascination with and appreciation for Mount Tamalpais, the symbolic peak of Marin County. She commented: “I speak about the mountain in the same way that Ibn ‘Arabi talks about what he calls God… by ‘God’ Ibn ‘Arabi means the ultimate spiritual experience with whatever is there.” Continuing with the analogy of the waves and the tide, which Etel saw as a beautiful image for spirituality, Etel responded to Ibn ‘Arabi’s statement that ‘the self is an ocean without a shore’ by pointing out that this is “in the sense that we say that the wave reaches the shore, but in fact it doesn’t. It has its own momentum when it hits the point where it comes back. The boundaries are not ‘hard shell boundaries’, but they represent the extreme point of possibility, the creation of its own limits… A writer like Ibn ‘Arabi does not bring knowledge in a ‘hard shell’ way. He is a practice. We read him and it lights our imagination.… to read Ibn ‘Arabi is to receive or create a spiritual event. With every reading, he invites us to approach what he calls God, and he brings us back to the self.”

The Etel Adnan Endowment Fund will be maintained by the Society in perpetuity in this spirit of recognition that there’s always a greater possibility for us. As Etel said, “a possibility is at the same time both infinite and limited in its nature.  Otherwise we will simply faint in total annihilation… we will be dissolved and no longer be here.” In deep gratitude to Etel for this gift, we very much intend to honour her generous legacy to the Society so that her endowment will continue for the benefit of many future generations.