Exhibition of the week Louvre Abu Dhabi
Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (+971 600 56 55 66, www.louvreabudhabi.ae)
For the art world, this month is a “very big deal” indeed, said John Arlidge in The Sunday Times. A decade in the making, the Louvre Abu Dhabi has finally opened its doors, and with costs totalling a reported £3bn, it turns out to be the “most expensive” art gallery yet built. The “oil-rich” emirate is aiming to “acquire a reputation for culture”, and has been “splashing the petrodollars” with a view to filling an entire island off its shore with museums and arts venues. This gallery, the first to reach completion, was conceived in a landmark deal with France’s museums: it involved an “eye-watering” £1bn in exchange for high-profile loans from the Paris Louvre and permission to use the Louvre’s name for 30 years. The aim has been to create a truly global museum of civilisation, highlighting the common ground shared by cultures throughout history, and mixing together everything from ancient Egyptian sarcophagi to sacred texts, to works by artists including Gauguin, Mondrian and Ai Weiwei. Despite Abu Dhabi’s questionable record on freedom of expression, the emirate hopes the project will give it a name as an “open and tolerant” destination. It is without doubt “the boldest bet” a city has yet made on the “appeal and value of art” – even bolder than Bilbao’s investment in its Guggenheim Museum. But will it pay off?
It certainly has in terms of architecture, said Edwin Heathcote in the FT. French architect Jean Nouvel’s design for the building is an “utterly original” proposition, a “village” of 55 small, white-walled exhibition spaces housed under a gigantic dome that appears to hover above them like a “flying saucer”. Adding to the drama, the sea washes right up to its “brilliant white edges”. The displays, meanwhile, are an “epic mix’n’match tour of global culture”, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. Among the most astonishing exhibits are a monumental twoheaded figure made in Jordan in 6500BC; a “hauntingly enigmatic” Bactrian statuette (below) from 2000BC; a “massive” effigy of Pharaoh Ramesses II juxtaposed against a “towering” marble Athena; and European masterpieces including Leonardo’s La Belle
Ferronnière and Monet’s view of the Gare Saint-lazare. Nevertheless, as the loosely chronological display approaches modern times, it begins to run out of steam.
Indeed, the galleries devoted to modern art feel “uninspired”, said Jan Dalley in the FT. Given the museum’s global scope, these displays are “disappointingly Western” – contemporary Middle Eastern art, for example, is represented in only the most “desultory” fashion. Altogether more “unsettling” is the allegedly appalling treatment of the migrant labourers who built the museum, said Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. Reports suggested that some were “kept in conditions akin to indentured servitude”, forced to work for months without pay and liable for “arrest and deportation” if they complained. “Spectacular” as the Louvre Abu Dhabi is, one cannot ignore its “troubling” genesis.
Robert Mccrum, the author and associate editor of The Observer, picks six books that confront mortality. His new book Every Third Thought: On Life, Death and the Endgame is published by Picador at £14.99
Do No Harm by Henry Marsh, 2014 (W&N £8.99). Henry Marsh’s vivid account of his career as a neurosurgeon. With unsparing candour, he takes the reader to the perilous front line of modern medicine, and somehow manages to combine pity and fear in this bestselling memoir.
The Year of Magical
Thinking by Joan Didion, 2005 (Harperperennial £8.99). A classic memoir of mourning by one of America’s coolest contemporary writers. Only a very special kind of artist can find the detachment to examine a devastating personal loss, especially if you are going to write about it inside out. But this is what Didion does.
Grief Works by Julia Samuel, 2017 (Penguin £12.99). “Death is the great exposer: it forces hidden fault lines and submerged secrets into the open.” This casebook from Julia Samuel, a renowned grief counsellor, is replete with many extraordinary stories and some remarkable wisdom.
Devotions upon Emergent
Occasions by John Donne, 1624 (Vintage £14). “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” One of my favourite books, a masterpiece of highJacobean prose by a great poet for whom the English language is a majestic instrument for the evocation of deep feeling, as well as the examination of complex and troubling truths.
The Violet Hour: Great
Writers at the End by Katie Roiphe, 2016 (Virago £8.99). Roiphe’s quest to make sense of her brush with death at the age of 12 takes her into the last days of six modern writers – including Susan Sontag and James Salter – in a painful attempt to find answers to the mysteries of the endgame.
I Feel Bad About My Neck
by Nora Ephron, 2006 (Black Swan £8.99). A brilliant collection of magazine pieces by the late, great screenwriter ( When Harry Met Sally...) and American ironist ( Heartburn). Her essay on death and dying, Considering the Alternative, says more in 15 pages than some have said in 500.