The Louvre Abu Dhabi, built at great expense over many years, is stunning

Geetanjali Krishna on why it offers a pretty rather than profound experience

It’s a magical, massive dome high above, seemingly floating in mid-air. Miraculously, even though Abu Dhabi’s blinding 46 degrees of sunlight is peeping through thousands of lattices in the ceiling, it is cool and breezy underneath. The filigreed dome casts playful shadows on the floor, as its Pritzker-winning architect Jean Nouvel envisaged, like the desert sun filtering through the fronds of a palm tree. Beyond, the Arabian Sea enters the Louvre’s portals, a constant wash of shimmery stillness. Mesmerised by the sight, I rest my feet after a morning spent exploring its galleries.

Yet, somehow, a sense of disappointment lingers. For gorgeous architecture is but one aspect of a truly great museum — the contents of its galleries are surely what matter most.

Here’s the background. Expectations ran high when the Louvre, built on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi at an estimated cost of USD 108 million and five years over schedule, opened its gates to the world in November 2017. Abu Dhabi paid France an estimated USD 525 million for the right to use the Louvre name for 30 years for what was envisaged as a “universal museum”, which would use art, sculpture and other artefacts from across civilisations to tell a unified story of mankind. For the first decade of its existence, 12 leading French museums other than the Paris Louvre, including the Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay and Versailles, would send over 300 artworks and artefacts 

to supplement the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s nascent collection.

The museum has a nice open feel, in welcome contrast to most buildings in the Emirates. The exhibition opens from a large well-lit space containing artefacts from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Africa and Europe, all depicting the age-old and cross-civilisational engagement with the theme of motherhood. A bronze statuette of the Egyptian goddess Isis nursing the infant Horus rubs shoulders with a 14th-century ivory Virgin and Child from France and a 19th-century carved wood mother and child from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The next few galleries take visitors through the first villages and settlements that grew across the globe, and then to the growth of religion, trade and politics. All along, as one walks from gallery to gallery, large windows afford glimpses of the sun, sea and the water bodies on which this gorgeous building seems somehow anchored.

Ahead, there are some fine specimens of Greek and Roman marbles, which, perhaps in keeping with local sensibilities, all sport discreet fig leaves.The galleries devoted to art are right at the end of the tour. The pièces de résistance, of course, are Leonardo da Vinci’s La Belle Ferronnière and a wonderful self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh. Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi will go on display mid-September onwards. Even so, art aficionados will be disappointed by the lack of depth of the gallery, as each major artist is represented by one, at best two, artworks.

Comparisons with the Paris Louvre, while possibly unfair, are inevitable. In Paris, artefacts from different civilisations are housed in different areas, making it simple for a visitor to get a quick sense of its evolution. Here, the constant juxtaposition of artefacts from across the globe, as well as across historical epochs, is relatively harder to follow. For example, 15th-century European artworks share space with Turkish tiles, and coins of all provenances are grouped together in a stunning but, to me, incomprehensible infinity display. And unlike the Paris Louvre, which has plenty of approachable and knowledgeable docents one can always pose questions to, the Louvre Abu Dhabi doesn’t. In fact, even the write-ups with each exhibit are in such a small font that visitors strain to read them.

In time, of course, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will have to convincingly defend its selection and narrative to secure its place on the global museum map. While many argue that the universal story of civilisation it tells, the commonalities it lays bare between diverse and distant cultures and the new connections one might be able to discern by removing the traditional geographical boundaries of civilisational artefacts, is exhilarating. But I’m equally fascinated by the themes it ignores. Slavery, gender and sexuality and political/ideological repression are uncomfortable, but also critical, elements of the universal human story. Perhaps this weeding out of ugly truths from its narrative has made the Louvre Abu Dhabi even easier on the eye — it remains up to the visitor to read between the lines or simply enjoy what is admittedly a pretty story indeed.

Day passes for the Louvre Abu Dhabi are AED 60 per adult, visitors under 22 years pay only AED 30