Abu Dhabi Louvre offers mixed works
ADECADE in the planning and five years past its due date, the Louvre Abu Dhabi has finally opened in the sunscoured capital city of the United Arab Emirates. And whatever else can be said of the new museum, it’s a sight to see.
Starchitecture is out of fashion these days, but it can still produce visual wonders. The look of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, might be described as Arabic-galactic. In the form of an immense, filigreed grey half-sphere resting on a low base infiltrated by water channels, it could pass as a spaceship.
The museum is technically in the city, but not in a way that feels organic. It stands on a large outcropping named Saadiyat Island, or Island of Happiness. Connected by a bridge to the mainland, this site will eventually be a “cultural district”, bristling with hotels, condos, malls and other museums, including an Abu Dhabi Guggenheim. Paid for with hydrocarbon cash and built largely by South Asian labourers, Saadiyat has been fabricated primarily as a destination for a global leisure class.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a fabrication, too. It isn’t an official Louvre franchise. For the equivalent of $1.15 billion, the museum has temporarily leased the Louvre brand. It can use the illustrious name for 30 years and borrow works from the Louvre and a dozen other French state institutions for a decade. This will give the new museum time to assemble a permanent collection – the acquisition process is well underway – and create its own version of a global art history.
Spread through 23 galleries, the inaugural display of some 600 objects – 300 from French museums, two dozen from Middle Eastern collections and around 230 from the Louvre Abu Dhabi itself – adheres to a textbook timeline. Where it is innovative is in being intercultural, with Western and non-Western work shown side by side.
A few big international museums have experimented with this kind of mix. None that I know of have committed to it, made it a house style. Elsewhere, old colonialist classifications, shaped along geographic and ethnic lines, are still deeply ingrained, not to mention politically useful. But the Louvre Abu Dhabi has not only gone with a fully integrated model; it also promotes that model as its distinguishing feature.
The way it works is clearly set out in an introductory “vestibule”, where vitrines hold small groups of thematically related objects. A bronze statuette of the Egyptian goddess Isis nursing the infant Horus, from 400800BC; a 14th-century ivory Virgin and Child from France; and a 19th-century carvedwood mother and child from the Democratic Republic of Congo together project a common image of maternity across cultures and millenniums.
This sort of grouping can be simplistic and historically inexact, but as a strategy, it has its uses. It’s really the only way to go for a broad-spectrum collection in progress. Although the Louvre Abu Dhabi has done a lot of buying – prehistoric to contemporary – since 2009, its rapidly gathered holdings have breadth but not depth. To show single strong objects from all over the map is a way to make a virtue of this limitation.
A mix-and-match approach also has potential advantages for education and visitor engagement. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is banking on the theory that pointing out links among a wide variety of cultures will make all art feel more approachable to the global audience it hopes to attract. Once viewers gain the habit of spotting connections, they may come to accept that all cultures are equally valuable and personally relevant.
Works that qualify as instantly recognisable “classics” to a Western viewer feel surreally exotic in this multicultur- alist environment. Leonardo da Vinci’s La Belle Ferronnière (1495-99), a kind of second-tier Mona Lisa sent by the Louvre in Paris, is one. Another is an 1822 Gilbert Stuart portrait of a schoolmarmish George Washington that has taken up permanent residence here. (The Louvre Abu Dhabi owns it.) And then there’s Jacques-Louis David’s towering, storm-racked equestrian image of Napoleon Bonaparte crossing the Alps, looking very far away indeed, in both miles and mood, from its home in Versailles.
In short, the Louvre Abu Dhabi fails where most, if not all, encyclopedic art museums do: in truth-telling. And the failure applies to the present as much as to the past. In news releases and advertising, the institution promises to be “a museum for everyone”; to show “humanity in a new light”; to embody an “openness” reflecting the “tolerant and accepting environment” of Emirati society. But international human rights groups have criticised the Abu Dhabi government for mistreatment of immigrant labourers on Saadiyat Island projects.
During the museum’s inaugural week, two Swiss journalists, filming labourers as part of their coverage of the opening, were arrested, grilled, forced to sign a “confession” and then expelled from the country.
A walk through Nouvel’s domed museum complex is an enchantment, almost enough to make you forget grim physical and social realities that went into creating it. And the manifold beauty of galleries filled with charismatic objects nearly persuades you not to remember that art is a record of crimes as well as of benign achievements. It takes an exercise in ethical balance to engage fully with our great museums, to walk the shaky bridge they construct between aesthetics and politics. A mindful visit to the Louvre Abu Dhabi requires this balance. That may be what is most universal about it.