LOUVRE TURNS ONE WITH OVERARCHING PLAN FROM OLD MASTERS TO POP STARS
▶ Dua Lipa is performing to mark museum’s first birthday as it plans Rembrandt exhibition, writes John Dennehy
It was a clear morning in November. The weather was finally cooling down and people were enjoying a first taste of winter. A normal Saturday, or so it seemed. But something quite extraordinary was happening that day on Saadiyat Island. On November 11 last year, Louvre Abu Dhabi finally opened to the public in the culmination of a 10-year journey for the UAE and France. Some people had said it might never happen.
“The first applause has to be for this beautiful building,” said Mohamed Al Mubarak, chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism. “We have accomplished history.”
Early that morning, waves of people arrived at the museum’s car parks and anticipation built as the shuttle buses took them to the front of the museum.
There, at 10am, Louvre Abu Dhabi director Manuel Rabate made a presentation to Kiyana and Kalyssa Jiwani, the two girls who were at the front of the queue. The doors were opened and Abu Dhabi would never be the same again.
The centrepiece of Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi is its silver dome that creates a spectacular “rain of light” effect as the sun passes overheard.
Underneath the dome sits a madina-like complex of 55 buildings. This aims to recreate the atmosphere of an Arabian agora, with narrow streets, galleries, a cafe and more.
What struck me most about Louvre Abu Dhabi when I visited it a few days earlier for a preview was how the building felt so much a part of the region.
I had followed the work of colleagues at The National who had reported on its construction, the architecture, the workers who built it and the art would showcase.
And now here was a building that seemed firmly rooted in the region. True, it would benefit from the completion of other projects surrounding it but Louvre Abu Dhabi is something not foreign, strange or imported.
In the year that followed, Louvre Abu Dhabi hosted well-received exhibitions on the history of the Louvre in Paris, how scientists discovered the world was round and the striking influence of Japanese prints on impressionism and modern art.
Along with its highly regarded permanent galleries, it stages four temporary exhibitions a year plus other cultural activities.
More thought-provoking exhibitions lie ahead. In February, masterpieces from one of the most acclaimed Old Masters, Rembrandt, will go on display. Later next year, Louvre Abu Dhabi will explore how the invention of photography in 1839 changed the world.
A year on, two special but wildly different events are among those marking its oneyear anniversary.
Its new exhibition, Roads of Arabia, shows how the history of the Arabian Peninsula did not begin with the oil well. Hundreds of artefacts explain how people lived, traded and died here for millennia.
Pop superstar Dua Lipa, meanwhile, will play a sold-out gig today to mark a year to the day that the museum opened.
“Be there to open the next chapter of Louvre Abu Dhabi’s history,” the museum said.
These two radically different events speak to the seriousness of the museum to investigate the past, without losing its sense of fun.
Next year, Louvre Abu Dhabi will explore how the invention of photography in 1839 changed the world