16 THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016
Features
Louvre Abu Dhabi
The word “universalism” started to be asso-
ciated with the project in 2005 on the initiative
of the Louvre’s then director, Henri Loyrette.
There were two considerations behind this shift
from the conventional art museum requested
by the Emiratis to a universal one desired by the
French. First, it allowed the collection’s range to
extend beyond historic European art and involve
other institutions, such as the Centre Pompidou
for recent art and the Musée du Quai Branly for
non-Western artefacts. This meant that the pres-
sure on the Louvre to provide loans for the entire
length of the 30-year contract could be shared
between ten museums.
The second reason emerges from the Decla-
ration on the Importance and Value of Universal
Museums. In 2002, Loyrette was one of the 18
signatories of this text. Also signed by his coun-
terparts at the biggest museums on both sides of
the Atlantic and in Russia, from the Metropolitan
Museum in New York to the Hermitage in St
Petersburg, and with the backing of the British
Museum, the declaration aimed to provide a
response to restitution claims for works of
art and antiquities taken from Greece and
former colonies. The declaration stated
that the items in these Western institu-
tions belonged to humanity as a whole;
there was thus no need for modern states
to contest their ownership.
This argument lacked both a legal and
symbolic basis; it was formulated outside
any international organisation and without
the approval of museums in the rest of the
world. The Abu Dhabi request, however,
came at just the right moment to remedy
this situation. By endorsing the concept
of the universal museum and providing
a place where French collections could
be displayed in the Middle East at the
emirate’s expense, Abu Dhabi helped the
Louvre legitimise the 2002 declaration. It
was not only the Louvre brand that was
being traded in the Abu Dhabi agree-
ment, but also the name of a sovereign
political entity outside the West.
Added to these technical reasons
was the widespread view in France that
the Louvre was the incarnation of the
philosophical revolution of the Age
of Enlightenment, a phrase coined by
Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher
of universalism in the modern history
of ideas. In a speech on 15 October
2011 at the start of the second Louvre
Abu Dhabi study day in Paris, Loyrette
echoed this, “What does a universal
museum of today look like?” he asked.
“At the start of the 21st century, how
should we renew the promises made
by the Revolution and the Empire?How to think about them after the more than two
centuries that have brought about a completely
diferent context?”
Finding the answers to these questions was
the task for the French curators charged with
bringing the new museum into existence. What
meaning does a universal museum brimming
with anti-religious and anti-monarchist revolu-
tionary history have in 21st-century Abu Dhabi,
with its monarchy that rapidly positioned itself
in the counter-revolutionary camp after the Arab
Spring of 2011?THE GRAND NARRATIVEThe Agence France-Muséums (AFM), a service
company monitored by the French Ministry
of Culture, was created just after the
intergovernmental agreement
of 6 March 2007 to establish
the Louvre Abu Dhabi in
order to implement its
directives. Divided into two
teams—one administrative,
the other scholarly—it
entrusted the writing
of the future museum’s
grand narrative and the for-
mation of its collection to a
team of state curators. Since
2007, these civil servants (who
are all French) have been under
the leadership of two curatorial
directors, Laurence Des Cars, who was
in the role from 2007 to 2013, and Jean-
François Charnier, who took over from her.
Under Des Cars’s guidance, the AFM developed
an approach to the concept of universalism that
could be described as historical. This consisted
of extending the Louvre’s remit into the modern
period, while making it more truly universal,
both in the age and the origin of the collections.
For after a period in the 19th century when it
extended its range in all directions, thanks to
the French Revolution preying on the Church’s
possessions, the Napoleonic wars in Europe and
colonial expansion on other continents, the
Louvre had drawn in on itself in the second half
of the 20th century, giving large parts of its collec-
tions to other Paris museums. Today, the Louvre
does not cover prehistory, nor any of the ancient
world beyond an expanded Mediterranean area
that includes Persia, and its art history stops in- For the preceding periods, you have to turn
to the Musée d’Archéologie Nationale in Saint-
Germain-en-Laye and, for the recent periods, the
Musée d’Orsay, then the Centre Pompidou. And
yet these establishments are all partners in the
Louvre Abu Dhabi project through the AFM. As
for geographic areas, while in 2000 the Louvre
made space for art from Africa, Asia, Oceania
and the Americas in the Pavillon des Sessions,
and in 2003 created a new department for
so-called “Islamic” art, Asia—from Afghanistan
to Japan via non-Muslim India and China—is
still conspicuously absent. Yet the Musée
Guimet, to which the Louvre’s Asian collections
were transferred in 1945, is one of the AFM’s main
Now, something becomes
universal not because it
follows the dictates of
human reason... but because
it transcends cultural
boundaries and is common
to all mankind; universalism is
what has always been—not
what will be, such as
the reign of political freedom
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15 and equalitypartners; it is even one of
its shareholders.
Budget limitations and
the availability of works of
art tempered this aim to
cover the entirety of historic
time and space, but narrative
constraints also helped define the
three priorities set by the curatorial
team under Des Cars: Western Christianity, the
Muslim world and Asia.CROSSROADS OF CIVILISATIONSWhen questioned in 2008, Des Cars also called
them “threads of civilisation”. Following these
threads, the Islamic world conveniently found
itself at the “crossroads of civilisations”, another
expression then central to the scholarly project.
This approach also allowed for the “decentred”
gaze that the new global history called for and
which the French team looked to adopt. The rest
of the world, comprising tropical Africa, Latin
America and Oceania, was thus pushed into
second place to be looked at from the point of
view of colonial conquests, again taking a histori-
cal approach to art.
This museological narrative also fitted in with,
and was partly inspired by, the great political
narrative of “cultural dialogue” so dear to the then
president, Jacques Chirac, who between 2005 and
2007 played a decisive role in the project, which
had been welcomed by the civil servants adminis-
tering French state museums, despite the fact that
their senior curators were initially unconvinced.
The phrase “cultural dialogue” came up repeatedly
in Chirac’s foreign policy speeches, a response to
the “clash of civilisations” embodied by 9/11 but
also by the British-American invasion of Iraq.
And yet, according to the American political
theorist Samuel Huntington, who propagated
the latter idea, the civilisations where the clashes
occur are precisely the three main blocks that Des
Cars’s scheme hoped to show in dialogue over the
centuries. Without fully disappearing, this histor-
ical approach to universalism was progressivelysupplanted by an anthropological one endorsed
by Charnier from his arrival at the AFM in 2008,
and it was imposed from 2013, the year when the
leadership changed both at the AFM and at the
Louvre in Paris, when Jean-Luc Martinez became
its director.
Charnier and Des Cars are both state curators
who trained in France in art history and archaeol-
ogy. But their scholarly paths had since diverged.
While Des Cars is an art historian specialising in
French paintings of the end of the 19th century,
Charnier specialises in archaeology and prehis-
tory. Des Cars arrived at the AFM from the Musée
d’Orsay in 2007, while Charnier came via two
ethnographic museums: the Musée Nationale des
Arts et Traditions Populaires and the Museum of
European and Mediterranean Civilisations in Mar-
seille, where art history gives way to anthropology.
With the anthropological approach, it is no
longer a question of embracing the whole world
in a classification system that is essentially Euro-
pean. The close tie between the universal museum
and the Enlightenment is loosened and France
and its Revolution are no longer major points of
reference. Now, something becomes universal not
because it follows the dictates of human reason,
as Kant airms, but because it transcends cultural
boundaries and is common to all mankind;
universalism is what has always been—not what
will be, such as the reign of political freedom and
equality. The anthropological approach clears
the universal museum of “promises made by the
Revolution and Empire”, to quote Loyrette, to
replace them with a meaning that is revolutionary
in its own way.
When humans create works of art to dis-
tinguish themselves, as a community or as an
individual, this artistic creation is full of similar-
ities that reflect the universality of man through
the ages and across the seas. That is Charnier’s
anthropological starting point and one that the
Louvre Abu Dhabi aims to portray. However, this
approach does not mean plunging into a world of
mere forms, severing the link between learning
and the museum. On the contrary—and this is its
great originality—it is quite unlike what you see
at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where,
because they both have beautiful curves, Renoir
nudes hang with medieval ironwork that in no
way provided inspiration to the French painter.
The AFM’s philosophy is to make the Louvre
Abu Dhabi a place where hypotheses are formu-
lated and research takes place to test them. It
is not a stage for poetry, however beautiful, on
which to dance with abandon. It is a museum
for a time of doubt, a time of post-Cold War
globalisation. But it will not drive reason from
the museum.Christ Showing His Wounds (around
1515-20, from Austria, Bavaria
or Germany). Left, a plate with
four lowers (around 1575)
from Iznik, TurkeyThis Djennenke igure (1228-95) from Mali’s
Bandiagara region is part of the collection CHRIST AND DJENNENKE: © LOUVRE ABU DHABI/THIERRY OLLIVIER. PLATE: © LOUVRE ABU DHABI/AGENCE PHOTO FA MUSEUM FOR A
TIME OF
DOUBT