The_Art_Newspaper_-_November_2016

THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016 15

Features

Louvre Abu Dhabi

HOLLANDE: EPA/ALAIN JOCARD/POOL MAXPPP OUT

A Lion Kills Prasenajit in the Jungle, c. 1775, Nepal (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Stella Kramrisch Collection, 1994-148-613; Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States,

1932, by Frida Kahlo (Colección Maria y Manuel Reyero, New York) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

For more information, including a list of generous donors and organizers, visit us online.

Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950

Through January 8

Coming Soon

New South Asian Galleries Now Open

A MUSEUM FOR A

TIME OF

DOUBT

Over a decade in the

making and due to

open in 2017, the Louvre

Abu Dhabi has evolved

into a museum that

has gone beyond being

merely a showcase for

historical European

art into one that is a

truly global institution

reflecting a new kind of

universalism. By

Alexandre Kazerouni

S

ince the announcement in 2006 that

a cultural district was to be created on

Saadiyat Island of Abu Dhabi in the

United Arab Emirates (UAE), ten years

have passed and the conventional art

museum sought by the Emiratis has

turned into a universal institution as a result of

influence almost exclusively from the French

side. Although the term “universal museum” is

a venerable one, anchored firmly in the history

of European philosophy, it ofers the capital of

the emirates something quite original today. At

the start of the 21st century, the concept behind

this new Louvre is shaking up the conventional

relationship between thinking and museums.

In July 2006, when the Saadiyat cultural district

was announced to the press as an urban planning

project centred on a performing arts hub and

four museums, the Louvre’s name was not yet

involved, unlike the Guggenheim’s, which was

then the main focus of interest. At that point,

all that was on the cards was a conventional art

museum entrusted to the architect Jean Nouvel.

However, talks with the Louvre had begun a year

earlier, in 2005, a few months before Thomas

Krens, the flamboyant director of the Guggenheim

Foundation, was contacted.

It was due to a desire to associate the emirate’s

name with that of the famous French institution

that the project was created in 2004 by the sons of

Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. That year was

marked by the death of their father, Abu Dhabi’s

ruler since 1966 and the driving force behind the

1971 unification of the emirates that make up the

UAE. The dynastic transition that had begun in

1990 came to an end and the Louvre Abu Dhabi

was the most resounding cultural expression of

the new distribution of power in the emirate.

The future museum was thus born of a

request from Abu Dhabi rather than an outside

proposal deriving from the economic globalisa-

tion of museums, as the later involvement of the

Guggenheim Foundation might appear to suggest.

The museological specifications of the Louvre Abu

Dhabi project were then defined in Paris, which

has also led on the choice of its content.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

François Hollande (centre), Sheikh Abdullah bin

Zayed Al Nahyan (fourth left) and Jean-Luc Martinez

(second right), with a model of the Louvre Abu Dhabi