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Louvre Abu Dhabi Reveals UAE’s Art Buying

November 9, 2017 by Marion Maneker

Gustave Caillebotte, Game of Bezique, 1880.

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

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Filed Under: Museums

About Marion Maneker

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