The Luminous Abstractions of Etel Adnan

The poet, novelist, journalist, and artist Etel Adnan (pictured above, on the Brittany coast) was born in Beirut in 1925. She grew up speaking Arabic and Greek at home, and was educated in French and English. In the late nineteen-fifties, while working as a philosophy professor in Northern California, Adnan began to express herself in a new language—painting—making luminous abstractions of the view of Mt. Tamalpais from her home in Sausalito. On Oct. 8, the Guggenheim opens the exhibition “Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure.”