Etel Adnan paired with Van Gogh in Amsterdam exhibition

Works of the late Lebanese artist are being shown alongside the famous Dutch painter in Colour as Language

Etel Adnan's 'Landscape' (circa 1990) is compared to paintings by Van Gogh in a new exhibition. Photo: The Estate of Etel Adnan

“Van Gogh really liberated colour,” said Etel Adnan about the famous Dutch painter. “Because he accepted it as true.”

Two years ago, curator Sara Tas at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam began speaking to Adnan about the possibility of an exhibition, thinking that Adnan and Vincent Van Gogh — though not often paired together — shared approaches to colour and landscape.

Tas says Adnan, who died in Paris last year, was immediately enthusiastic, having encountered Van Gogh’s work in Paris in her twenties. She had recognised its importance then, paving the way for the experiments with colour in abstraction.

Now, the Van Gogh Museum has opened an extensive retrospective of Adnan’s paintings and works on paper, with 72 by the artist being shown alongside a handful of Van Gogh paintings from its collection — including one of Adnan's largest-scale investigations of Mount Tamalpais in California, a 1985 depiction of the landscape that travelled from the Sursock Museum for the first time.

”It shows us how Van Gogh’s work is still relevant for the artists of today,” says Tas about the Colour as Language exhibition. “By doing this combination we also start looking at Van Gogh with fresh eyes, and especially when we look at his work through the eyes of other artists, like Etel Adnan.”

The similarities between the two are apparent, if not obvious: both Adnan and Van Gogh had no formal training in art, and were interested in the idea of painting as reflective of internal worlds. But they also had a keen eye for the nuances of the external world, such as the yellowness of a certain field of grass or the bluishness of a face at night, and how the painting might take these hints of colour further to become a canvas of pure expression.

“His Sunflowers is a particular yellow, which isn’t the same yellow as the fields, and even the blue of Van Gogh’s eyes in his portraits is a sharp blue,” Adnan said, in a series of conversations with Tas on Van Gogh and colour that were conducted before her death. The blue of the Van Gogh’s eyes, she added, was too much for the taste of his time.

The focus on colour highlights its importance to Adnan’s work, which is often read in relation to her poetry or even her biography. She similarly liberated colours from their realism, portraying her major subject of Mount Tamalpais as a collection of blues, greens, yellows, and reds, far removed from the consistently green wooded peak of the northern California mountain.

Born in Beirut in 1925, Adnan grew up speaking Greek, Turkish and French. In 1949, she left the city to study philosophy in Paris, where she first saw Van Gogh’s works. She then moved to northern California for the first of two stays there, teaching art and aesthetics until 1972. She lived in Beirut in the '70s — at the end of its cultural golden age — and then returned to northern California in the '80s. Her partner, artist Simone Fattal, set up the Post-Apollo Press, a radical publisher of poetry and translation, and Adnan drew and painted.

While Adnan never shied away from discussing her work or the ideas behind it, one of the unintended gifts of this show is her remarks on the subject of colour. The conversations around the exhibition have been published in Colour as Language’s catalogue.

“When I first started painting, I realised that when I squeezed a paint tube, the colour in front of me was so intense and so pure that it looked beautiful and right,” she says. “I was reluctant to mix it with other colours. It almost hurt to mix it, as if I was killing that beauty.”

From their house north of San Francisco, Adnan could see Mount Tamalpais, which dominates the landscape. She once said that you could barely cycle through San Francisco without seeing it at the end of a street — a similar feeling to the stature it now wields over her oeuvre.

In her paintings, she delineated the mountain's gradients by the use of different colours, and likewise denoted sky and sea only by their placement on the canvas. Across the works, the subject position of the mountain remains the same, front and centre, but choices of tones and their positions vary substantially. The more you see of the paintings, the less they become about a mountain than about colour itself.

For Van Gogh, the focus on colour has a similar effect. It goes without saying that he is a bigger household name than Adnan, and one aim of this exhibition, says Tas, is to attract a local audience interested in new artists rather than the international tourists for whom the Van Gogh Museum is a five-star-rated Tripadvisor attraction. The pairing with Adnan injects a sense of novelty into Van Gogh’s work, rescuing it from its over exposure.

Placed alongside Adnan’s more intrepid uses of abstraction, Van Gogh’s own detours from the path of representationality reveal themselves. The flatness of his perspective comes to the fore, or the way he loses himself in the squiggly paths of tree roots, seen from such proximity that it is hard to make out they are. Adnan, who was born 35 years after Van Gogh died, seems to be pushing him forwards, away from his depictions of landscapes in different lights, and towards an understanding of colour and light as things in their own right.

The exhibition also looks at Adnan’s leporellos, or concertinaed books in which she transcribed her own writing and that of Arab poets, embellished with drawings. Such booklets, often known as dafatir, were common in Arab modernism, and often resulted from collaborations between Arab poets and artists. Here their various themes — exile, the politics of the Arab world, her experience of Mount Tamalpais — are a reminder of Adnan’s prodigious intellect, her ability to unpack aesthetic theory as much as to create an artwork.

Colour, she says in the conversations recorded here, is Nietzschean: a “manifestation of the will to power”. As always with Adnan’s writing, there is a moment when the curtain is pulled down and we remember what the act of art is: the making of a world, out of tubes of paint, where there was none before.

Colour as Language is at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until September 4