As the first universal museum outside the western world, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will inaugurate on Arab soil a cultural institution born in Enlightenment Europe. Its values and identity are based on the concepts of discovery, exchanges and education which are sustained within the unique alliance between the greatest museum in the world and modern Arabia.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s scientific and cultural project provides the future museum’s intellectual and conceptual backbone. It encapsulates this exchange in an original museographic approach honed to showcase and nurture dialogue between art from different civilisations and cultures around the world, stretching from the most remotely immemorial to the very latest. Overstepping boundaries between art forms and techniques, and between civilisations and geographic regions, to cast light on the underlying exchanges as much as each one’s distinctive wealth captures something about Abu Dhabi’s multicultural ethos and Arabia’s millenary role as a bridge between the West and East, and between the North and South, as it was in the days of the Incense Route, and as the Persian Gulf served as a link between Europe and the Indian Ocean opening up exchanges between Asia and Africa.

The goal is to give visitors the bearings they need to understand how art developed in each civilisation (the West, Arabic and Muslim world, and Asia, as well as Africa, the Americas and Australasia). The Louvre Abu Dhabi will also develop a deliberately comparative approach in a concentrated display encompassing a few hundred relevant and revealing works in an area that is small enough to encapsulate the full message in one visit by following a unique path through the museum.

The scientific and cultural project will stretch across four versions successively deepening and fine-tuning the message until 2010. The trail will follow a chronological as well as theme-based rationale along which the different civilisations will unfurl in parallel and concomitantly.

The chronological trail will be divided into four major periods that the general public will easily understand: archaeology and the birth of civilisation; medieval days and the birth of Islam; the Classical period from Humanism to the Enlightenment; and modern and contemporary days starting at the end of the 18th century.

Honing a message that will encapsulate this historical and cultural perspective in a limited number of works, involves choosing a number of theme levels - which will also enable the annual rotation of works on loan from France during the museum’s first ten years. The first level, which will provide the guiding theme running throughout the visit, will be a fundamental aspect of artistic creation. It will change every year and broach momentous human issues such as power, history, spirituality, intimacy and so on. These major themes will be developed according to the civilisations and periods under review.
These differences in handling of each civilisation will require contextualising works by insisting on the importance of the surrounding indoor and outdoor architecture and decoration, and the relationship to cinema, music and literature in each civilisation under review.

Under the same educational agenda, the scientific and cultural project takes an essential look at issues touching on human as much as audiovisual mediation, and on the place of animated images in the museum experience, which will be used to escort and guide visitors from around the world during their experience. A museum for children, comprising an autonomous exhibition gallery and workshops, will complete the experience. In this way, the project will strive to build the Enlightenment’s invitation to look at works with a sensitive and educated eye, with a view to studying them, comparing them and delighting in their invariably singular meaning.

In constructing its universal subject matter on the principles set by the intergovernmental agreement of March 2007, the scientific and cultural project will highlight the wealth of French public collections and will offer a very broad panorama of these, in a single location, for the first time ever. The temporary-exhibition programme will be devised at the same time as the scientific and cultural project and will amplify the message in the museum’s galleries, by inviting the collections of the entire world to contribute to original events, which will be likely to circulate around the major international museum institutions.

Acquisitions Committee of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum

Article 7 of the intergovernmental agreement signed on 6 March 2007 specifies that Agence France-Muséums offers consultancy service and assistance in formulating the strategy for acquiring permanent collections of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum. The Emirian and the French parties are in agreement that only very top quality works of art must be acquired in order to set up a front-rank collection which could be recognised as such internationally. The Agency is the adviser for setting up an Acquisitions Committee based on the model of the Musée du Louvre, and proposes the practical modalities for acquisition. The strictest of ethics presides over the choice of artworks, notably in terms of their origin. The Committee’s approval is indispensable for all acquisitions. Established through a joint agreement between the Emirian and the French parties, the Committee is made up of twelve members and is presided over by His Excellency Sheikh Sultan Bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan.

It is composed of three members appointed by the Emirian party:
Mr Mubarak Hamad Al Muhairi,
H.E. Mr Zaki Anwar Nusseibeh,
H. E. Mr Saeed Al Hajeri,

and eight members appointed by the French party:

Mr Pierre Rosenberg - Vice-President of the Acquisitions Committee; Member of the Institute; Honorary Chairman-director of the Musée du Louvre,
Mr François Baratte - Vice-President of the Conseil national de la recherche archéologique; Member of the Consultative Committee for overseas archeological research, Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs; Professor at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne - INHA,
Mrs Marie-Claude Beaud - Director of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco,
Mr Peter Fuhring - Professor at Fondation Custodia,
Mr Jean-François Jarrige - Member of the Institute; Director of UMR at the CNRS; former Chairman of the Musée national des Arts asiatiques - Guimet,
Mr Henri Loyrette - Member of the Institute; Chairman-director of the Musée du Louvre,
Mr Michel Pastoureau - Professor at EPHE,
Mr Gilles Veinstein - Professor at Collège de France.

The first acquisitions

Nineteen works of art have been acquired. These first works, coming from three continents, cover the period from the 6th century BC to the 20th century, and are directly within the trajectory defined by the Scientific and Cultural Project. Six of them come from the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé collection.The acquisitions were unveiled on 26 May 2009 by His Excellency Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of the French Republic, during the official launch of the construction works of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum. They were on display at the Emirates Palace, the place where official delegations are received, until 31 August 2009 as part of the presentation « Talking Art: Louvre Abu Dhabi ». These first acquisitions are supplemented by ten loaned works of art from the French national collections, thus reflecting the collections to be presented by the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum over the first ten years of its opening.