The_Art_Newspaper_-_November_2016

THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 284, November 2016 1

CLUNY: © PLINE. FONTAINEBLEAU: © BÉATRICE LÉCUYER-BIBAL. LOUVRE: © DEMIANNNN. POMPIDOU: © OH PARIS. GUIMET: © DAVID MONNIAUX

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

Get a sneak preview of

the Los Angeles County

Museum of Art’s radical

new architecture

Museums

Page 26

Museums

17

The lesser-known

beneiciaries of

the Louvre Abu

Dhabi deal

Museums across France are making quick use of cash injections

FUNDING

Paris. In 2007, France and the United Arab

Emirates signed an unprecedented agreement

to create the Louvre Abu Dhabi, financed to the

tune of $1bn by the Emirati government. The

Musée du Louvre in Paris—whose former direc-

tor, Henri Loyrette, masterminded the encyclo-

paedic programme—committed its name, exper-

tise and works to the project for 30 years.

Less well known, however, is that 12

other French institutions have also agreed to

contribute loans in exchange for a €265m fee

spread over 15 years. This is “the first time that

French museums have joined forces to partic-

ipate in an international cultural co-operation

project of such magnitude”, says Marc Ladreit

de Lacharrière, the president of Agence France-

Muséums, an umbrella organisation created in

2007 to oversee the project.

As work continues on the Jean Nouvel-de-

signed museum in Abu Dhabi, now due to open

in 2017, we found out how five French museums

are quietly reaping the financial rewards of this

unusual transnational deal.

Hannah McGivern

• For more, see Review, pp15-

Two key

curators

depart

Guggenheim

Abu Dhabi

APPOINTMENTS &

DEPARTURES

Abu Dhabi. The departure of two

key members of the Guggenheim

Abu Dhabi curatorial team has

raised questions about the status of

the Frank Gehry-designed museum.

The project’s associate curator for

Middle Eastern art, Reem Fadda, and

its assistant curator, Fawz Kabra,

both left this summer, reducing the

project’s New York-based team of

curators from five to three.

Announcing her departure on

Facebook, Fadda wrote that she was

“moving back to the Arab world” to

work as a freelancer. The curator,

who joined the project in 2010,

helped shape the future museum’s

curatorial vision. Kabra, meanwhile,

says she has not joined another insti-

tution since leaving her post in July.

Work continues

Both curators declined to comment

further on their departures and

a Guggenheim spokeswoman

declined to confirm whether the

museum has plans to replace them.

The remaining staff members

include Valerie Hillings, the Gug-

genheim Abu Dhabi’s manager of

curatorial affairs, who has been

with the project since its inception.

(Two additional curators, employed

by the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Cul-

tural Authority, work on the initia-

tive full-time in the UAE.)

Some wonder whether the

departures foreshadow a more

permanent change of plan for the

museum, which originially aimed

to open in 2012. Guy Mannes-Abbott,

a member of the activist group Gulf

Labor, which campaigns against the

mistreatment of migrant labourers

in the UAE, predicts that the project

will become “a moving feast”

shown in existing spaces under

the Guggenheim brand. A museum

spokeswoman says: “Work on the

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi curatorial

strategy and collection is continu-

ing apace.”

Aimee Dawson

The Louvre in Paris is the project’s main

lender and beneiciary. In 2008, the

museum’s then-director, Henri Loyrette, told

us that the deal represented “a revolution”

for French museums because it provided

them “with what you in the US and UK are

used to—namely, an endowment fund”. The

Louvre’s fund received an initial €120m from

Abu Dhabi in 2010, with a second, smaller

payment due by the end of this year. The

interest, along with loan fees for the inaugural

displays, has funded 92% of a €53.5m

efort to overhaul the Paris museum’s I.M.

Pei-designed Pyramid entrance, due to be

complete next year. Licensing of the Louvre

name will cover the majority of a planned

€60m storage facility at Liévin, near Lens.

The Centre Pompidou stands to gain around

€18m from Abu Dhabi over 15 years, according

to Denis Berthomier, the Pompidou’s executive

director. The museum plans to use the funds

to improve visitors’ experience. It has hired

the architect Renzo Piano to complete a €2m

renovation of its canopy next year. After 2019,

the museum will begin work on a semi-public

storage and conservation centre for its growing

collection of contemporary art.

France’s national museum of Medieval art is dedicating €4m from

its Abu Dhabi windfall to a €7.4m expansion (the remainder will be

paid by the French state). The project includes the restoration of the

Gothic chapel and ruined Gallo-Roman thermal baths. Funding the

work, which will continue until 2020, “would certainly have been

slower and more diicult” without Abu Dhabi, says the museum’s

director, Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye.

The Château de

Fontainebleau

enjoys a “special

link” with Abu

Dhabi, says Vincent

Droguet, the site’s

director of heritage

and collections. The

château’s imperial

theatre, designed

for Napoleon III

in 1857, reopened

in 2014 after a

€5m restoration

sponsored by the

UAE president and

ruler of Abu Dhabi,

Sheikh Khalifa

bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The château spent its €370,000 fee from Abu

Dhabi—for the loan of a 16th-century copy of the Vatican’s Apollo

Belvedere statue—on new acquisitions for the Napoleon I Museum.

The French national museum of Asian arts, where the Louvre’s entire

Asian art department was transferred after the Second World War,

is due to lend around 100 objects to Abu Dhabi. The partnership

could prove a lifeline for an institution that receives relatively little

state support. Loan fees may inance the €3.5m conversion of the

museum’s disused roof terrace into a restaurant—a project to which

the French government has so far turned “a deaf ear”, the museum’s

director, Sophie Makariou, told Le Monde in September. H.M.

MUSÉE DU LOUVRE CENTRE POMPIDOU

MUSÉE DE CLUNY

CHÂTEAU DE FONTAINEBLEAU

MUSÉE GUIMET