A decade ago,
Abu Dhabi, announced its partnership with the Louvre Museum in Paris. The
much-anticipated Louvre Abu Dhabi museum will finally open to the public on
November 11, with a spectacular series of celebrations.
About 300 works bought by the organisation will be on view, along with
more than 300 works on loan from French museums. A look at the art it gathered
in the space of a decade.
A work of art
A 3.75 foot high work by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, ‘Composition
with Blue, Red, Yellow, and Black’, was acquired in 2009.
A painting by the Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, ‘Game of Bezique’,
which was painted in 1880, was also purchased by the museum in 2009.
A year later, the museum scored a coup by acquiring a work by Paul
Gauguin’s ‘Children Wrestling’ from 1888 (also known as ‘Breton Boys Wrestling’).
A 1928 painting by the surrealist painter René Magritte, ‘The Subjugated
Reader’, isn’t a prime representation of Magritte’s style (a work of roughly
the same size by the artist, which he painted in the same year, sold for $7.2
million at Christie’s London in 2012) but has found a place in the museum.
Curatorial narrative
The true treasures seem to be its older works, which the museum has
continued (and will continue) to acquire. There’s a stunning head of the Buddha
from Northern China, carved out of white marble in the mid-sixth century.
Also present is an equally magnificent gold bracelet adorned with lions’
heads, made in Iranian Azerbaijan in the 8th-7th century BCE.
And if it’s unclear how a red Chinese-lacquer French commode from 1753
might highlight the museum’s stated aim to “highlight universal themes and
common influences,” or if the connection between Giovanni Bellini’s ‘Mother and
Child’ (1480- 1485) and an Egyptian sarcophagus from the 10th century BCE is
tenuous, not to fear: There’s been a strong curatorial attempt to weave all of
these disparate objects together.
The museum
The building, a collection of 55 individual buildings underneath a
massive, 590 foot-wide dome, is intended to be a destination in itself. Set on
the long-stalled development project known as Saadiyat Island, the “museum
city” that comprises the Louvre Abu Dhabi overlooks the water and includes
museum galleries, temporary exhibition spaces, a two-storey children’s museum,
a restaurant, cinema, and cafe.
Source:THE ECONOMIC TIMES-10th November,2017
