'The world's first universal museum': the Louvre Abu Dhabi revealed

If you happen to be flying to Africa, Asia or Australia on Etihad this winter, there’s a compelling new reason to break the journey with a stopover in Abu Dhabi. On November 11, more than a decade after a governmental agreement was signed between France and the emirate, the Louvre Abu Dhabi is finally set to open on Saadiyat, one of 200 or so islands off its coast.

It promises to become a place of pilgrimage for aficionados of architecture and art, but its national significance is much more than that of a mere tourist magnet. As its director, Manuel Rabaté (formerly of the Musée Quai Branly and then Agence France-Muséums in Paris, who moved to Abu Dhabi in 2010), told me at its London launch, the opening of this new cultural landmark provides an opportunity for the UAE - a nation that came into being only in 1971 - to assert its place in the world. There will be a permanent state collection that is gradually being acquired and currently embraces about 620 works, the first of which was the Mondrian in Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s collection, bought at Christie’s in 2009.

The bulk of the exhibits, however, will be drawn not only from the Louvre, but potentially all 17 of France’s national collections, which embrace most of the major museums in Paris as well as the Chateau of Chambord in the Loire. They'll be complemented by works from a handful of international collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The oldest exhibit will be Paleolithic; the newest commissions from the artists Jenny Holzer (born 1950) and Giuseppe Penone (born 1947). And the opening exhibition will seek to tell the story of global civilisation.

If most national museums are “encyclopaedic” in their remit and ambition, Rabaté’s object is to create “the world’s first universal” museum, a place that will allow us “to see humanity in a new light” and gain “enlightenment through art”. So rather than exhibit works according to where they come from, they will be grouped chronologically in terms of their aesthetics and type “to enable visitors to walk through time”. A strikingly beautiful statuette of a Bactrian princess from Central Asia, c3000-2000BCE, will stand alongside similar figures from contemporaneous civilisations in Ancient Egypt, Babylon and China. There will be vitrines that allow you to see how gold was treated – and venerated – by different cultures at similar times. Too often, says Rabaté, “museums are too compartmentalised. Our curation will aim to reconnect them, and stress our common values. Hence the idea of universality.”

It ought therefore to prompt viewers to see works – even the familiar European paintings on display, among them Bellini’s Virgin and Child (there’s no ducking overtly Christian imagery; nor are nudes proscribed), Leonardo’s La Belle Ferronière, Jacques - Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Rodin’s Bacchus in the Vat (a warming against the misuse of alcohol), a Van Gogh self-portrait, Manet’s Fife Player and Matisse’s Still Life with Magnolia – with what Proust called “new eyes”.

If the collection is stellar, the waterfront building is no less of a draw, consisting as it does of 55 low, white buildings (containing 23 galleries, temporary exhibition space, a children’s museum, a 200-seat auditorium, a restaurant, café and shop), clustered to form a sort of stylised medina and partially enclosed beneath a giant white dome, 180m in diameter, 36m tall at its highest point and composed of eight layers made up of 7,850 irregular yet connected geometric shapes arranged like stars. During the day sunlight will fall through them in what its architect, Jean Nouvel, calls “a rain of light”, like sunlight through a moucharabiah screen. After dark the whole huge structure will glow like a Moroccan filigree lantern: a dazzling visual metaphor for enlightenment.

Admission to the Louvre Abu Dhabi costs DH60 (￡12)  for adults; it is free for under-14s.

For more on what to do in Abu Dhabi, see visitabudhabi.ae

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