By Tobias Grey
Financial Times

Adnan’s geometric style of painting, with its grainy juxtaposed bands of colour, has often been compared to that of the Franco-Russian Nicolas de Staël but the two differ on one substantial point. Whereas de Staël would repeatedly go back over and repaint areas of his work, once Adnan has laid down a mass of colour she never goes back. It is a style utterly in keeping with her decisive personality. In conversation Adnan is no ditherer. Her opinions on everything from the blowback effect of colonial education on the rise of Isis to postwar Expressionist American art as an epic and effervescent form of soft power sadly lacking today are trenchant and well argued.

After many years of moving about, Adnan now lives in Paris, where her home, which she shares with her long-term partner, the Syrian sculptor Simone Fattal, is a well-appointed Belle Époque apartment near the Church of Saint-Sulpice. In a backroom she has her studio where she alternates between two wooden tables: one for painting and sketching (she prefers a flat surface to work on, as opposed to an easel) and one for writing (she writes in French and English and has published several volumes of poetry, two novels, a play and numerous newspaper editorials).

Previously accustomed to working in spurts, in the last few years Adnan has found herself painting nearly every day to keep pace with the voracious demand for her work. In 2012 Adnan’s oil paintings and leporellos (books filled with her illustrations and writing which unfold like accordions) were a big hit at Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Since then she has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s last biennial and had solo shows at London’s White Cube and Serpentine (artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist is a notable champion of her work) galleries and the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha.

The irony of this belated attention does not escape Adnan. “I’ve never been so busy,” she says. “My energy goes down as my invitations go up and I begin to make money when I can’t use it.” Adnan’s latest solo show is a career retrospective at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Adnan has somewhat bittersweet feelings about the show, which exhibits her paintings and poetry, as well as her designs for tapestries and ceramics.

On the one hand she is proud to be an Arab artist (albeit with a US passport) and to exhibit in a French institution that supports Arab artists; on the other she is deeply disappointed with the institute’s recent appointment of a Saudi university professor, Mojeb Al-Zahrani, as its director.

“Saudi Arabia is the most backwards country in the world,” she says. “I find it a slap in the face that the new director of the Institut du Monde Arabe is a professor from Jeddah.”

Adnan, born in Beirut in 1925, was an only child and rare offspring of a mixed marriage in that era. Her mother was a Greek Orthodox from Smyrna and her father a Muslim from Syria who was a major in the Ottoman Army under Atatürk. A framed photograph of her father in full military regalia hangs on a wall of her living room. “Mixed marriages were sacrilegious at that time,” Adnan says. “Neither one of them converted one way or another, which was very nice.”

As a child Adnan attended a religious French school run by Catholic nuns in Beirut. “Among my generation, you either went to a French school or you did not go to school,” she says. Speaking Arabic at the school was outlawed. “There was a very clear decision to eradicate local languages and I find that criminal,” she adds. She believes the after-effects of this type of colonial education are still felt today, as since that time in countries such as Lebanon there has been a constant dearth of qualified Arabic teachers.

“This is how Daesh spread, because Arab countries needed teachers of Arabic and Saudi Arabia sent teachers at its own expense,” Adnan says. “But these teachers didn’t teach only Arabic, they also taught Wahhabism in the Koranic schools, which is an incredibly dangerous version of Sunni Islam.”

In her writing Adnan has never been afraid to expose the contradictions and violent sectarianism of the Arab world. Death threats forced her to flee Lebanon after she wrote her moving novel Sitt Marie Rose (1978), which was triggered by the real-life murder of a Christian school teacher by a gang of Phalangists after she fell in love with a Palestinian activist.

Adnan describes herself as an artist of “epiphanies”. In other words, she is an artist of sudden and striking realisations. She only began to paint at the age of 34 after leaving France and arriving in the US in 1955. Her mentor was an American artist, Ann O’Hanlon, who ran the art department at the Dominican College of San Rafael in California where Adnan was teaching the philosophy of art.

“Ann asked me: Do you paint?” she recounts. “I said ‘no’ and when she asked ‘Why not?’, instead of saying for example ‘When you teach philosophy you don’t need to practise painting,’ I said ‘Because my mother said I was clumsy.’ And you know what, it freed my hands.”

Using crayons, Adnan began modestly by making coloured squares on small scraps of paper. For a long time afterwards she would always begin a painting with a red square. “One colour then called for another, and I would proceed like that,” she says. Adnan’s great revelation was discovering the vast American landscape, particularly Mount Tamalpais near the Californian coast.

“Mount Tamalpais became my house,” she once said. “For Cézanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.”

From 1968-1986 Adnan painted the mountain thousands of times in oil, watercolour and ink, or a combination of all three. Over a similar period of time she also jotted down her thoughts about the mountain, which resulted in a wonderful book meditating on art and nature called Journey to Mount Tamalpais, published in 1986.

“When I arrived in America I was pretty much on my own,” Adnan says now. “When I began teaching, before really getting into painting, it became a point of reference for me. It was psychological: as soon as I saw it I felt grounded.”

Despite Adnan’s newfound fame, one senses it’s a feeling that has never left her.