On the lunar landscape that is Saadiyat Island, the shape of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is gradually emerging from the sand. On the gigantic shorefront site, work continues around the clock. The 5,000-strong workforce is expected to swell to 7,500 over the coming months. “We shall deliver the building at the end of 2015,” its architect Jean Nouvel tells The Art Newspaper. “Then a few months will be needed to set up the inner structures and hang the works,” he says. The museum’s official opening date, which has not yet been set, will be in 2016.
The building first has to meet the criteria of “excellence” shared by the architect, the Louvre and the emirate, meaning that the safety of the collections is ensured under extreme climatic conditions. Furthermore, the summer heat excludes a formal opening between May and September, when the temperature can rise well above 40°C. A date will also need to suit the agendas of the various heads of state expected to attend.
The development of the island’s museums, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Zayed National Museum, is managed by the Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC). The legal framework under which they will operate has not been established yet, but the post of director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi has already been proposed. The Paris museum’s managing director, Hervé Barbaret, 49, is a possible choice, according to a source close to the project.
It is now possible to see how the collections will be presented in a remarkable complex comprising 56 buildings, covering a total area of 86,000 sq. m that Nouvel refers to as a 21st-century “medina”. The exhibition spaces are dramatic, designed on an “unpredictable scale”, Nouvel says. Some are 27m high. The fabulous flattened dome, covering the galleries as well as the open spaces, is now in place. Weighing 7,000 tons, with a diameter of 180m, this jigsaw-like structure was carefully lifted by a supersized crane and is now resting only on its four piers. Eight layers of intricate, lace-like decoration, in stainless steel and aluminium, are being added over the top and underneath. The structure will form a canopy, inspired by the shade of an oasis, that “will let only 1.8% of the sunlight filter into the building and its courtyards”, says the architect Hala Wardé, Nouvel’s partner who is in charge of the project in the Gulf. Water is one of the omnipresent features of this “medina”. From a wide plaza there is a staircase down to a seawater basin. Considerable work has been done offshore around the island to protect the museum from storms and prevent terrorist attacks.
Visiting the site last month, the president of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, was clearly impressed by the progress of the work. He remembers he had to climb into a fishing boat when he first visited the island; it is now connected to Abu Dhabi by a 600m-long bridge. When he was appointed head of the Louvre two years ago, it was hard to believe the new museum would ever see the light of day. Six years after the 2007 signing of the extraordinary contract, under which the Louvre was to receive €1bn, work had not yet started. Clearly unhappy, the emirate was having second thoughts in the wake of the financial and real-estate crisis. Martinez made this project his top priority. He began visiting the city every two months and changed the project team. Archaeologist and anthropologist Jean-François Charnier was appointed as the scientific director, bringing a new vision of what Nouvel now describes as an “archetypal museum”. During his visit, Martinez was able to show how 600 works will be displayed for the opening. Half have been chosen from the Abu Dhabi museum’s collection, all acquired since 2007, and half will be loaned by the Louvre and other French national collections, including portraits by Titian and Leonardo, as well as Girardon’s huge marble Apollo and the nymphs, from Versailles.
“It cannot be a little Louvre”
“We must create a new museum around the dialogue between cultures,” Charnier says. “It cannot be a little Louvre, a collage centred on French Classical art. We had to change our perspective, taking into account the great civilisations of India or China, for instance, that are so important for the Arab world.” The scientific and cultural project announced last June under his direction speaks of “a universal message”.
The 12 permanent galleries form a closed circuit organised chronologically. Renaud Piérard, the scenographer working with Nouvel, speaks of “an amicable tension” between the objects from different places, showing their differences or similarities at the same period. The entrance hall will feature different representations of maternity: a Fang statuette, a Virgin and the Egyptian deity Isis, for example. This will be followed by a gallery with the first human figures, from all continents, and a second one with monumental sculptures from the first empires. One gallery evokes the universal religions through their relationship with light: a mosque lamp, a Gothic stained-glass window and a golden Buddha. The curators also intend to contrast the relationship between religions and images, with examples from Hindu, Japanese and Muslim representations.
A gallery devoted to 1900 and the Universal Exhibition will confront Rodin’s sculptures to Khmer art and antique statues that inspired him, while different forms of abstraction will close the 20th century. Charnier is convinced that the Louvre Abu Dhabi, “with its global approach of art history overcoming the dichotomy between civilisations and collections”, will shape a completely new museum–a crossroads of history’s cultural routes that have nurtured artistic diversity and creativity, as well as the universality of mankind.