Louvre Abu Dhabi again

Continued from here.  

The marble bust of a bedouin chief stared gravely down upon me.  I loved the careless folds of his shawl

And Da Vinci's La Belle Ferroniere fixed me with an even more piercing stare.
I stared back, no hurry, no  jostling crowds, trying to figure what makes a Da Vinci so special.
This is the only one of his 15 paintings outside of Europe.
This museum has bought Salvatore Mundi as well.

What are the odds of coming across 9,000 year old neolithic statues from Ain Ghazal in
two museums in two different countries?  I had just beaten those odds. I had seen
them at the antiquities museum at Jordan and now here again I was face-to-face
with the two-headed beauties.

A museum is a wonderful place, in general, and so too the Louvre at Abu Dhabi.  It is not crammed to the gills with stuff, and some of it is quirky and odd. Like this statuette of female fertility from the early villages gallery.  There was
one of a Bactrian princess which is also ancient.

The influence of the French museum collection was evident in the presence of these two paintings.

Portrait of King Louis XIV, Rene-Antoine Houasse, oil on canvas, 1674

Napolean crossing the Alps.  by Jacques-Louis David.  He painted five versions of this,
believe it or not - a precursor to today's clients requiring colour options - the versions
differing in colour of horse, sash, as also the look on his face.  I gathered that is the Second
Versailles version.

A Chinese dragon, A Chola beauty and a prince from Lagash

This bronzed winged dragon from the 3rd century BC was a beauty

... as was this Chola bronze, 

and this black stone carving of Gudea, the prince of the
Kingdom of Lagash, south of Mesopotamia, (modern
Iraq)  Dated at 2120BCE, the diorite stone is
believed to have been imported from the Oman
peninsula.

The floor was cross-crossed with a place-names map

"Young Emir Studying" - Osman Hamdy bey, from Istanbul in 1878

On loan from the Musée d’Orsay:​​​​Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portrait, 1887

Edouard Manet - one of his Gyspy series

Hans Holbein's portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt

And the Picassos!

Matisse

Kandinsky

Piet Mondrian caught my eye because of my aunt

"The Residence of  a Sugarcane planter in Brazil" - by the Dutch painter Frans Post, reminded me of home.

And the three W's - Walden, Warhol and the Whistler

The Docks of Cardiff - Lionel Walden.  I loved this one.

"Big Electric Hair" - Warhol, again this is a series, in many colours.

Whistler's Mother

A Koran and a Tora sat close to each other.

Chinese screens

And Japanese ones too

Egyptian frieze

An Islamic frieze of Quranic verses  in sandstone , from the Ghazni empire, about AD 1200

And Durga, Krishna and Maithreya too

The description read, "Between the 5th and 15th centuries, India was a leading creative centre in the domain of religious sculpture.  The lives of venerated individuals were illustrated in works produced to accompany the spread of Buddhism and Hinduism into Central Asia, and from South-East Asia, into China, Korea and Japan.  Their purpose was to encourage meditation by devotees and their encounter with the divine."

A Chola dynasty granite Durga, 12th century

A Krishna painting - supposedly they have a 150 Krishna paintings, which they will display in rotation!!

Maithreya, from the Gandhara period.

So much more - The Horses of the Sun, Cy Twombly's series in blue, Alexander the Great's bust (what's remaining of it actually), cuneiform, Isis, Chinese pottery, Japanese Edo paintings of Mt Fuji.....

I would love to go back, potter around the Cosmology gallery a bit more maybe, see the Bactrian princess again, and my little female statuette from south America  ...  and probably Salvatore Mundi will be displayed.

The audacious architecture of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi

May 2018

It's the month of Ramzan in Abu Dhabi and the days in May in this desert metropolis are warm.  But we are from Madras, toughened by our summer and humidity, so nothing to complain about!

It is graduation time at NYUAD and we are here for Commencement, as they call it.  (Commencement of what, I wondered.)  Saadiyat is where NYUAD is located, and unlike most university neighourboods, Saadiyat is very tony, very upmarket and planned as an art and culture enclave, with the the Rafael Vinoly designed NYUAD campus the first occupants of the island, back in 2014!  With its high line, covered walkways, it is a pretty cool building in terms of design and architecture.

And I am pretty sure the head gardener is from Madras - Copper Pod, Neem, Bougainvillae and Nandivattal are in profusion as we walk through the common areas that have a much greener look than when we were at Marhaba four years ago. 

The red vented bulbuls and doves were present across the campus.

So the Neem flowers even in the desert!

And so we have the privilege of visiting the Louvre in Abu Dhabi.

The day turns out to be cloudy, and we see the dome and complex on our way in to Saadiyat island.   While the Louvre has opened, a Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim is also on the drawing board

Our first glimpse of Jean Nouvel's "floating dome", some 7,500 tonnes I had read!

The 8 layers of the dome create more than 7,000 "stars" of sunlight, filtering the desert sun.  All through the museum we would have glimpses of the water.

OK, so I did peek out of every window and was thoroughly distracted from the art treasures.  I am a sucker for water views.

And I have to say that for once my son showed remarkable patience with his malingering and wandering mother! 

There were windows like this one everywhere.  The architecture does make this museum experience quite different from any other and the outdoor spaces so beautifully include the waters of the bay on which AD is located.

The starry roof, in the day.  When the sun is strong, there will be sunbeams of lights making patterns on the floor - we missed that experience as it was a cloudy day.

This was my favourite view and space

The roof, within the rxhibit area of the museum.

Ai Weiwei's magnificent "chandelier" the Tower of Light, with the roof above

Two tons and almost 35,000 crystal make this art nstallation!

Its a great story in itself - inspired by a Communist Russian ideal Tatlin monument, "Ai’s sculpture reads this history from a Chinese context: Monument to the Third International in the guise of a crystal chandelier speaks of the gap between the Chinese Communist Party’s ideals and the elite’s taste for opulence in real life."

I Read all about it here:  The story behind Ai Weiwei's Fountain of Light at Louvre Abu Dhabi

Up-close

The Abu Dhabi skyline

Sunset views

I wondered whether we would visit AD again.  Maybe not.  But then again, who knows?

(More on the eclectic and somewhat quirky art and museum collections in a  later post, hopefully.)