The Louvre Abu Dhabi: French Universalism, Exported Seth Graebner

The Louvre Abu Dhabi: French Universalism, Exported Seth Graebner L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2014, pp. 186-199 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2014.0019 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/550292 Access provided at 7 Jan 2020 20:10 GMT from Washington University @ St. Louis The Louvre Abu Dhabi: French Universalism, Exported Seth Graebner RANCE ARGUABLY HAS MORE PEOPLE than most other countries thinking actively about the export of “culture,” whether conceived Fas artistic production or as national norms of thought and meaning. This development is not recent: questions about the need for (and the means and ends of) cultural exportation have arisen regularly at least since the Rev- olution. When the destination countries have been situated outside Europe, the discussion, often colored by colonialist discourse, has generally viewed the culture for export as “universal” as well as French. The Louvre as a monu- ment of French culture and a museum for the world has for two hundred years stood among the main symbols of the preeminence of France in the production and curation of the Western European traditions of art called, until recently, universal. Though the eighteenth-century founders of the Louvre Museum invented neither the concept of “high art” nor the notion of France’s universal mission in the world, France’s most famous art museum has clearly become part of the cultural and political construction known paradoxically as “French universalism.”1 Scholars have traced the history of the Louvre as building, as art collection, as public institution, and as symbol. This article will analyze an episode of its twenty-first-century life in which a set of actors ranging from art historians and curators to government ministers and journal- ists have both articulated wholly new purposes for the Louvre and defended venerable conceptions of its historic role. That the Persian Gulf will support the first museum outside France to carry the Louvre name demonstrates the continued salience of universalism in both French and Arab thinking, and pro- vides an opportunity to question its premises and its future. Most readers of the 13 December 2006 issue of Le Monde would have known no context of events in which to place the “tribune” of the day, a polemic signed by the former curators Françoise Cachin and Jean Clair and the art historian Roland Recht, figures mostly unknown outside the artistic and museum professions, and bearing the title “Les musées ne sont pas à vendre.”2 Some readers perhaps remembered that two months earlier the paper had reported that a delegation of officials from the United Arab Emi- rates had expressed their interest the previous summer in constructing a museum in partnership with the Louvre.3 After several months of silence, the © L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2014), pp. 186–199 SETH GRAEBNER issue returned noisily to the press in mid-December of that year. The authors of the op-ed declared their vehement opposition not only to any partnership with a museum to be created in the Emirates, but also to the principle of remuneration from the Emiratis to the Louvre for pieces lent under the partnership, and especially for such schemes involving the transport of well- known works outside France for significant periods. Their objections addressed the plan involving Abu Dhabi, as well as an existing program of loans to the High Museum in Atlanta (“la riche cité du Coca-Cola,” as the authors called it), host of a three-year series of exhibitions of works from the Louvre, including major works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, Velázquez, and Vermeer; most notably for the editorialists, Raphael’s Portrait of Baldas- sare Castiglione had left France for the first time since its acquisition by the Louvre.4 They protested (slightly too much) that “Nous ne méprisons ni l’ar- gent, ni le mécénat, ni l’Amérique, comme l’on risque très rapidement de nous en accuser. Mais tout cela peut nous entraîner dans une déviance que nul ne pourra bientôt plus limiter. Sur le plan moral, l’utilisation commer- ciale et médiatique des chefs-d’œuvre du patrimoine national, fondements de l’histoire de notre culture et que la République se doit de montrer et de pré- server pour les générations futures, ne peut que choquer” (Cachin, Clair, and Recht). For Cachin, Clair, and Recht, the Louvre housed and indeed embod- ied a version of French culture that the Republic must protect. The Louvre, in a contemporary interpretation of its Revolutionary-era foundation as a national museum, has become associated with the republican value of high culture for all (on certain centralizing and assimilationist terms) in a way inconceivable for any rival museum or tourist attraction. In keeping with the traditions of republican political agitation in the voluntarist state, those opposed to museums profiting from their loans gathered to protest, albeit online rather than in the street. Eventually some 5,100 people from a variety of countries (though few if any from the Emirates) made their way to a web site edited by Didier Rykner of the Tribune de l’art in order to petition the government to stop such museum deals in the future generally, and the one then contemplated with Abu Dhabi specifically. Not all commentators agreed with the opposition to what officials soon baptized the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Several prominent figures endorsed the plan, including the socialist legislator and former Minister of Culture Jack Lang, the director of the Louvre Henri Loyrette, and the director of the government agency Musées de France. Apart from Libération, the press generally took a favorable (Le Monde) or even enthusiastic (Le Figaro) view. An op-ed author writing in early 2007 called the opposition and resulting dialogue de sourds VOL. 54, NO. 2 187 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR “bien franchouillard,” and said that given the advantages of the proposed exchange, “franchement […] il faut être Français pour trouver à redire.”5 Once the members of the Senate had mandated the establishment of a code of ethics (a charte déontologique) for paid museum loans, it might have seemed to observers both French and foreign that any further controversy was indeed a typically French tempest in a teacup.6 Yet the eventual creation of a code of ethics did not quiet the protesters, who continued to fight the Louvre Abu Dhabi project up to and beyond the signature of the agreements and the Emi- ratis’ payment of the first fees to the Louvre, an installment of fifty million euros in March and April 2007. In order both to understand the protesters’ objections, and to see what is at stake when the French consider the role of the Louvre in the era of globalization of cultural consumption, this article will first briefly present the scope and form of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project, and then analyze the rhetoric of both proponents and protesters. The project In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi found itself somewhat overshadowed by the dramatic economic development occurring in its neighbor, the formerly sleepy Dubai. There a forest of skyscrapers was springing up as fast as observers could write about it, supported by the city’s growing importance as the financial center of the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, and as investors know now, a large dose of pure speculation (to say nothing of cheap and exploitable labor from Asia). Sheik Khalifa Ben Zayed Al-Nahyan, Emir of Abu Dhabi and President of the UAE Federation, appears to have envisioned a different role for Abu Dhabi, largest and richest of the five emirates. While little of his decision-making process has become public, by about 2004 scholars around the world began to notice the begin- nings of a major (indeed, record-breaking) program of investments in cultural projects of regional and global ambition. First came the establishment of new campuses by Yale University, New York University, and the Sorbonne, designed to grant diplomas of equal standing to those of the respective home institutions. Then the government of Abu Dhabi, acting through the parastatal Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority and its real estate developer, the Tourism Development and Investment Company, announced a plan to convert a barrier island of sand and mangroves near the city into the Emirate’s “cultural dis- trict,” at costs estimated around 25 billion euros. Saadiyat (Happiness) Island would include several “world-class” museums and performance halls designed by famous architects, a biennale park, national and maritime museums, as well as pleasure boat marinas, several dozen luxury hotels, a golf 188 SUMMER 2014 SETH GRAEBNER course, and vacation villas and condominiums to house 150,000 people.7 Along with the “inévitable Guggenheim,” the Louvre was one of the first institutions the Emiratis contacted in their effort to find partners for the Saadiyat Island project, as early as June 2005 (Cachin, Clair, and Recht). The delegation sent to Paris, as Le Monde reported a year after the fact, “envi- sage[ait] d’acquérir la ‘marque’ Louvre et des prestations fournies par les musées français […]. À l’époque, le Louvre ne se montre pas très chaud pour participer à une telle opération” (Follorou and de Roux). Several delegations later, however, the museum changed its mind: as the language of Le Monde suggested, it became possible by the fall of 2006 to talk about the Louvre as a multifaceted brand, which implied the development of two relatively new ideas in relation to the building, the institution, and their contents. First, these writers viewed the Louvre as a name with world-wide cachet for loan, sale or purchase.

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