A FRENCH ART REVOLUTION CONQUERS THE CAPITAL
▶ The first temporary show at Louvre Abu Dhabi delves into the history of its sister institution. Melissa Gronlund reports
The ouvre of the 18th century was what might today be branded an “arts hub”. The palace, once a royal residence, had been vacated by French royalty and served as studio paces and apartments for elite artists and artisans. Painters, sculptors, clockmakers, woodworkers and all sorts of craftsmen lived and worked side-byside, trading ideas and co-operating on different artworks and objects.
A collaboration between an astronomer and mechanist, and a silversmith, for example, resulted in the boisterously outre object known as the “creation of the world” clock: a clock face surrounded by gilded bronze rays, which emanate outward like a sun in mid-explosion. A second dial, nestled in folds of silvered bronze, shows the moving position of the stars, while at the clock’s bottom, a silvered bronze globe once rotated throughout the day. When the Louvre in Paris shipped this extraordinary feat of 18th-century engineering to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the museum reoriented the globe so that the long ray emanating downward from the clock face points towards a particular location– Abu Dhabi.
From One Louvre to Another is the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s first temporary exhibition, showing the institution setting out its identity as an heir to the eminent French museum. Curated by Jean-Luc Martinez, president-director of the Louvre, and Juliette Trey, curator of the prints and drawings department, the exhibition has two aims: to showcase exemplary iece from he Louvre n Paris, articularly from ts decorative objects ollection, nd more importantly, to tell he tory the museum itself.
It begin with ouis IV the Su
K ng, who moved th royal resi nces to ersaille freeing the uvre o be a site of rtisti tivity.A dedicated believer i the arts, Louis XIV used he Louvre to disp ay the royal collection, and as apartments and udio pace for artists and artisans orking here He also transformed his ne home, Versailles, into ite where the public could enjoy an engage ith art. ere, the public had three evels of access: a garden, where visitors could alk among th mostly ssical r classicalcopy statuary; n inner ring, of statues and paintings, accessible to courtiers; and finally, his private apartments, popula ed with works particularly special to him.
The exhibition re-creates these circles of engagement. The first room collect works that would have been in the gardens; one sees, for example, a pair sculptures that Louis XIV commissioned of the nymphs Acis an Galatea, as well s vases brought from other palaces, indicating the continuity of tradition between these royal ites and Louis XIV’s new residence. A stunn ng sculpture of Diana, the Roman goddess of unting, graced exclusive ar s of the palace; this is Italian from he second century, tself based on Greek statue from 330BC.
sts of ouis XIV era nserted themselves nt this reco-Roman lineag – copying classi l statuary, or often si dding to t to legitimise themselves s equal to heights f antiquity. Here the antler on he mall deer ana’ side re 7th-cent y impr )
In he nner sanctum f Louis XIV’ quarte the ex bition ows th te ases commissioned: wl
fro semi-preciou stone that he in ordered to b further embellished, wit lling and miniatur s composed of rubies diamonds nd phires They re extraordinary monument to opulence, and a reminder Louis XIV’s canny use of arts and de r as means governance; setting th standard dress so high that courtiers had to divert all their resource to keeping with the latest styles.
The museum, in these hree and throughout, tell its story not ju t through the ar objects, ut through an almost thea ical vocation the time period. roo howing he outdoor statuary, for example, re given strips llpaper of garden scenes the period, as if the visitor is utdoors. The site representi the rooms open to co tiers is painted a deep red, of the e ashionable to the period, and stat s sit within ockedup arches, sugge ing how th might have been displa d in the alace itself.
Elsewhere, videos animate contemporary illustrations to evoke a sense of life at the time, in the studio spaces of the 1700s, for example, or amid the revolution of the century’s end. While museum exhibitions typically adhere to white-cube displays, From One
Louvre to Another swaps this for scene-setting, and indeed makes the argument that the white-cube display is not the norm but simply the style du jour – a reminder of the many different aesthetics that create the context for the production and evaluation of art.
In some cases, this stagecraft does not go far enough: one mirrored wall is meant to signal the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, but does little either to communicate that particular vertiginous example nor to get across the moreis-more, cluttered aesthetic that reigned in art-making, exhibition display and domestic decor during the period. But the sumptuous paintings and objets d’art in the middle portion of the exhibition, which illustrates the 1700s’ moment of artistic collaborations, step into the breech. Here, a strong display of finely wrought objects and academic-style paintings, installed in the salon style of multiple rows of paintings reaching up to the ceiling (traditionally, though not here, with those on the upper level helpfully angled downward towards their viewing public), positions the 1700s as the highlight of the Louvre years, both in terms of the quality of the works and the role of the Louvre palace itself in fostering artistic production. The Louvre was also at this time the home of The Academie Française. To be accepted into the Academie, artists had to paint a portrait of another academician; many of these paintings eventually become part of the collection of the Louvre, enriching the museum both with the artworks and with remnants of this cultural history.
What we would today recognise as the Louvre opened in 1793 as the Museum Central des Arts, when the royal collection became the state collection, open to and representative of its public. It was a hugely symbolic event for post-Revolutionary France, and inaugurated the model that the Louvre has followed since: a public museum, with an eye towards presenting comprehensive and impressive chronologies of cultural history.
Many of the museum’s most famous works, such as the
Laocoon and His Sons (which is not in this exhibition), arrived during the Napoleonic years, when France’s plundering armies vastly added to the museum’s collection. (The museum also changed its name here for a bit, to the Musee Napoleon, and its first commission – included in this show – was an almost comically large bust of the emperor.)
It is at this point – the early 1800s – that From One Louvre
to Another shifts from being a very French exhibition to one cognisant of the world outside. The painting The Visit by the Pasha of Mosul to the Excavations at Khorsabad
(1853) shows the French-led expedition to uncover the remains of the Assyrian capital in what is now northern Iraq; a richly engraved copper vase from Syria is inscribed with the honorifics of the sultan of the time (circa 1239-1260) in angular Kufic script. A lone, skinny statue represents the culture of the Easter Islands; my guide suggested it had been recovered from a shipwreck.
Rather than lingering on this sudden moment of horizon expansion, however, the museum hurries from here quickly to the present, signalling the move to Abu Dhabi only by stagecraft. In the last room, three works in a series by German artist Candida Hofer show the galleries of the Louvre, devoid of people. On the opposite wall is a window looking onto Abu Dhabi island. But the museum Louvre Abu Dhabi itself is missing, which feels like a particular shame within the narrative that From
One Louvre to Another sets out. Wending through the compact line of influence from Greece and Rome to northern Europe, one is reminded of the necessity for major museums, with major budgets and major publicity platforms – such as that of the Louvre Abu Dhabi – to complement the concentration of art histories in the West. The Louvre Abu Dhabi can do more to show how it is both a continuation of the desires towards universal knowledge that animate the collecting strategies of the great world museums of the West, as well as how it breaks with them, and opposes their national histories with a more prominent placement of the art and artefacts of nonwestern cultures.
This will be the first of a series of exhibitions showcasing the collections and museums comprising Agence France Museums, the group of 12 French museums that lend work to the Louvre Abu Dhabi under the founding FrenchAbu Dhabi agreement. At the very least, this will be an opportunity for the French museums to highlight their collections and bring them to the attention of the Abu Dhabi public and its visitors – which is not half bad. But at the best, the Louvre Abu Dhabi uses these exhibitions to further define what an “another” Louvre can offer the world.
From One Louvre to Another runs until April 7 at Louvre Abu Dhabi