ABU DHABI, LENS, AND LOS ANGELES: THE AVANT-GARDE ARCHITECTURE OF THREE 21ST CENTURY UNIVERSAL ART MUSEUMS by Leslie Elaine Reid APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Richard Brettell, Chair ___________________________________________ Nils Roemer ___________________________________________ Maximilian Schich ___________________________________________ Charissa N. Terranova Copyright 2019 Leslie Elaine Reid All Rights Reserved ABU DHABI, LENS, AND LOS ANGELES: THE AVANT-GARDE ARCHITECTURE OF THREE 21ST CENTURY UNIVERSAL ART MUSEUMS by LESLIE ELAINE REID, MLA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES - AESTHETIC STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2019 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank, in particular, two people in Paris for their kindness and generosity in granting me interviews, providing electronic links to their work, and emailing me data on the Louvre-Lens for my dissertation. Adrién Gardère of studio adrien gardère and Catherine Mosbach of mosbach paysagists gave hours of their time and provided invaluable insight for this dissertation. And – even after I had returned to the United States, they continued to email documents that I would need. March 2019 iv ABU DHABI, LENS, AND LOS ANGELES: THE AVANT-GARDE ARCHITECTURE OF THREE 21ST CENTURY UNIVERSAL ART MUSEUMS Leslie Elaine Reid, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2019 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Richard Brettell Rooted in the late 18th and 19th century idea of the museum as a “library of past civilizations,” the universal or encyclopedic museum attempts to cover as much of the history of mankind through “art” as possible. The prototypes for this kind of museum are the Louvre, the British Museum, the Hermitage, and the Metropolitan Museum, which are enormous in scale and cover millennia of global cultural production. This dissertation will examine this model of the inclusive art museum in the early twenty-first century—essentially unbounded chronologically and geographically—and study its transformation in newer institutions less tied to national ideologies by analyzing three museums on three continents in buildings designed by three Pritzker prize winning architects. The first museum to be analyzed is a satellite location of the Louvre, located in northeastern France in the city of Lens. Amid criticism that the Grand Louvre inordinately privileges v Parisians with all the French art and culture and none for the other areas of France, the Ministry of Culture and the Louvre Directorate initiated a call for proposals, with the one from the city of Lens being selected. The Louvre is not the first museum to decentralize its holdings and use satellite locations, for the trend includes the Tate, the Guggenheim, and the Hermitage, but the location in Lens with a failing economy and no established cultural programs makes the case study intensely instructive and fascinating. The world class Japanese firm SANAA designed the new museum. One of these institutions in a building by Peter Zumthor (LA, to start construction in 2019) was selected because it was planned after the museum had already decided to be “universal” and had selected an architect to design a building that would embody that universality in “modern” terms. This American urban museum does not have a “national” agenda, and its building is NOT rooted in the neo-classical or neo-baroque tradition of the universal museum, thus linking "universality" with "modernity." These two museums will be contrasted with a museum in a part of the world in which the universal art museum is a “European” import—Abu Dhabi. A “branch” of the first great universal museum—the Louvre— the Louvre Abu Dhabi is situated in a massive building by the French architect, Jean Nouvel. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iv ABSTRACT . .v LIST OF FIGURES . viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION . .1 CHAPTER 2 OVERVIEW OF THE UNIVERSAL MUSEUM . 18 CHAPTER 3 THE UNIVERSAL MUSEUM AS HORS-LE-MURS. 47 CHAPTER 4 THE UNIVERSAL MUSEUM IN THE ARABIAN PENINSULA. .91 CHAPTER 5 THE UNIVERSAL MUSEUM ON THE “MIRACLE MILE” . .. 119 CHAPTER 6 IS THE UNIVERSAL MUSEUM TRULY COSMOPOLITAN?. 138 CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION: A “NEW MODERN UNIVERSAL”. 160 REFERENCES . .172 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH . 184 CURRICULUM VITAE . .185 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Altes Museum Façade. Berlin, Germany . 27 Figure 2. Altes Museum, Berlin. Plan of the Ground Floor . .30 Figure 3. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. “View of the Outer Staircase.” 1829 . .32 Figure 4. Glyptothek. Main Portico . 33 Figure 5. Glyptothek. Floorplan . .34 Figure 6. Le Corbusier. Mundaneum . .36 Figure 7. The Louvre-Lens . 77 Figure 8. Louvre-Lens Ground floor . .79 Figure 9. Le Galerie du Temps . 83 Figure 10. Louvre Abu Dhabi . .105 Figure 11. Proposed Building Plan for LACMA . 107 Figure 12. Louvre Abu Dhabi Floor Plan . 110 Figure 13. Degas Dancer Blocking Whistler’s Mother Painting . .114 Figure 14. Cy Twombly Paintings Blocked by Black Barrier . .115 Figure 15. LACMA 1960s . .123 Figure 16. LACMA 1980s. 124 Figure 17. LACMA 1990s . .124 Figure 18. Gwen Stefani and Levitated Mass . 127 Figure 19. La Brea Tar Pits . 129 Figure 20. Plan for Los Angeles County Museum crossing over Wilshire Boulevard . 130 viii Figure 21. Louvre Abu Dhabi Floor Plan . 166 Figure 22. Dallas Museum of Art floor plan . .165 ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “Vous avez crée un muséum; rassemblez-y soigneusement tout ce que la république renferme déjà de chefs-d’oeuvre […] et que la terre entière s’empresse d’y venir déposer ses trésors, ses singularités, ses productions; et tous les titres de son histoire: qu’il soit les archives du globe.” “You have created a Museum; carefully assembled here every masterpiece which the Republic [of France] already possesses…and the entire world will be eager to deposit its treasures, its singularities, its accomplishments; and the documents of its history: that [the Museum] be the archive of the world.”1 (author’s emphasis) This charge was given by Comte François Antoine de Boissy d’Anglas in 1793 to the museum commission responsible for gathering and collecting works of art for the newly created Musée Central des Arts in Paris which would be the future Musée du Louvre.2 The assertiveness exhibited in this early statement has become a mandate for the universal art museum, and the comte’s confidence and conviction represent the very essence of the universal art museum. For the Grand Louvre as well as other universal art museums are, indeed, an archive, a repository for 1 Sylvain Laveissière, Napoléon et le Louvre (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2004), 14. 2 Taylor L.Poulin. “An Oasis in the Desert? Issues and Intracacies Involving the Louvre Abu Dhabi Expansion”. Inquiries Journal. Vol 2, No. 02, 2010. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/177/an-oasis-in-the-desert-issues-and-intricacies- concerning-the-louvre-abu-dhabi-museum-expansion. Accessed 3 Apr 2018. 1 objects from all over the world and an archive from all time periods and to the extent possible – a world view. As to the effort to study the architecture of the universal museum, this type of museum is one of the most effective mechanisms for enabling cultural exchange. Because the universal museum is not nationalistic in scope, it reflects a cosmopolitan sensibility with a broad mission of inclusiveness of many cultures. James Cuno, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, writes of “… the need for the universal museum and the importance of analyzing the architecture in order to provide a model for developing nations that is not nationalistic in scope but rather cosmopolitan.”3 Acknowledging that the universal museum is a powerful entity associated with a mission that enables it to preserve the world’s culture and to advance the ideas of enlightenment, openness, and integration throughout the world, Cuno argues that universal museums should be established everywhere in the world presently lacking one, emphasizing that this is the best way for cultural exchange to flourish.4 The purpose of this dissertation is to identify, describe, and examine the characteristics of the post-World War II universal art museum as they apply to the architectural vocabulary, the architectural plans, and the modes of display in three universal museums. This study will investigate this model of the universal art museum, essentially unbounded chronologically and geographically, and examine its transformation into a newer form, less tied to national 3 James Cuno. “Culture War: The Case Against Repatriating Museum Artifacts.” Foreign Affairs. Nov/Dec 2014. V 93. No. 6, 122. 44 Ibid. 2 ideologies, resulting in a new modern “universality”. It will focus on a comparative analysis of three universal museums built in the early twenty-first century: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Louvre-Lens, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Before examining the three museums, however, a key term, universal museum, must be discussed. The words, encyclopedic, universal, universal survey museum, and inclusive are all applied to the universal art museum. For this dissertation, the word universal will be used. However, it must be noted that the term is hotly debated and not without its share of controversy. The term universal art museum seemed to lag behind the nomenclature encyclopedic museum and just returned to prominence in 2003 with the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums.5 Defining the universal museum, James Cuno in his remarks at Washington University School of Law in March 2004, fielded the question about the origin and meaning of the term universal museum posed to him. Cuno said he “interpreted ‘universal museum’ to mean the same as ‘encyclopaedic museum;’ that a museums [sic] that aspires to building, presenting, and studying a collection of objects representative of the world’s many cultures.6 5 “Encyclopedic Museum.” Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1982.