Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow published a long look at the Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi museum showcasing the region’s cultural prowess. This weekend, the public will get a chance to see the combined display of the Abu Dhabi’s own art and works on loan from the Louvre. But the museum isn’t so much a replication of the western museum model as it is an attempt to create a global art history, according to Manuel Rabaté, the museum’s director:
Mr. Rabaté said the museum’s mix-and-match approach is meant to counter conventional ideas about art-history hierarchies. That’s why an 8,000-year-old figure with two heads from Jordan will get the same treatment as a Benin bronze head or Leonardo da Vinci’s “Portrait of a Woman, also called La Belle Ferronnière.”
Bloomberg’s James Tarmy offers a list of some of the museum’s acquisitions now revealed as works advantageously purchased during the art market slump in 2009:
- There’s a 3.75 foot high work by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow, and Black, which the lot notes indicate was acquired in 2009.
- Gustave Caillebotte, Game of Bezique, which was painted in 1880, was also purchased by the museum in 2009
- as was Eduoard Manet’s The Gypsy, painted between 1862 and 1867
- A year later, the museum scored a coup by acquiring a work by Paul Gauguin’s Children Wrestling from 1888
- a 1928 René Magritte, The Subjugated Reader
- a blue and white series of nine, eight and a half foot-high panels by Cy Twombly, which the artist painted three years before his death in 2008
