Etel Adnan’s Leporellos

Etel Adnan, Inkpots, 2015, ink and watercolor on paper, 78 3/4″. Click to enlarge.

We’ve featured Etel Adnan, who turned ninety this year, on the Daily before. A Lebanese American poet and artist, Adnan was born in Beirut; she lived in California for some fifty years before moving to Paris. She excels in many media—paintings, tapestries, novels, poems—but the most unique, I think, are her leporellos: accordion-folded booklets of the sort once sold in Victorian England as souvenirs, folding out to reveal panoramic illustrations. Adnan uses them to a variety of ends, often using them as vehicles for unpublished poems and fragments. Some of them are more than six and a half feet long when fully extended; on one of them, she wrote a series of poems in Arabic, a language in which she seldom composes.

These four will be on display at Galerie Lelong, along with some of her paintings and a tapestry, through May 8.

In 2012, she told Nana Asfour,

My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing. But in general, my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.