Louvre Abu Dhabi — museum
Francesco Bini · CC BY-SA 4.0

Louvre Abu Dhabi

  • 2 min read
  • 24.533° N 54.400° E

Interesting facts

  • The foundations rest on 4,536 steel and reinforced-concrete piles, completed in 2010 before the galleries began to rise.
  • The dome weighs about 7,000 tonnes, yet its entire load is carried by just four concrete pillars concealed within the gallery buildings.
  • Jean Nouvel, architect of the Arab World Institute in Paris, was first suggested for the commission by Thomas Krens, then director of the Guggenheim Foundation.
  • Leonardo's 'Salvator Mundi', bought at a record price for a painting and announced for display here, has never been shown; its 2018 unveiling was postponed indefinitely.
  • The agreement with France bars any other Louvre-branded museum in the other emirates and in about a dozen countries of the Gulf and Middle East.
  • As part of the deal, the Paris Louvre opened a Sheikh Zayed Centre in 2016: three rooms on the history of the Louvre Palace.
  • In 2019 the waterfront boulevard outside the museum was named after Jacques Chirac, the French president who championed the project.
  • Its signs use a bespoke Arabic typeface by Kristyan Sarkis, and the pictograms are built from shapes cast by the dome's 'rain of light'.
  • The first 19 acquisitions, shown in 2009, included a fourteenth-century Mamluk Qur'an, a Bellini Virgin and Child and a 1922 Mondrian.
  • Within about two years of opening it had drawn 2 million visitors, making it the most visited museum in the Arab world.

Why it is worth it

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a museum built around a single idea about light. Jean Nouvel covered a small city of white galleries with an immense flat dome, 180 metres across, made of eight layers of interlaced metal — four of stainless steel outside, four of aluminium within — whose 7,850 star-shaped pieces overlap in a geometric lattice. Sunlight falls through the gaps as a shifting pattern of flecks on the walkways and water below, a "rain of light" meant to recall sun filtering through the fronds of a palm grove in an oasis.

Beneath the dome, the museum is laid out like an Arab town rather than a single building. Some fifty-five low white blocks, twenty-three of them galleries, are separated by lanes and small plazas and edged by water, so that visitors move between rooms along shaded promenades. The dome itself, weighing thousands of tonnes, rests on just four supports hidden inside the pavilions and appears to float. It stands on the waterfront of Saadiyat Island, a man-made cultural district on the coast of the capital.

The museum opened in November 2017, the outcome of a 2007 agreement between the United Arab Emirates and France that licenses the Louvre name — now until 2047 — and brings loans, exhibitions and expertise from French museums. Its curatorial idea is universal rather than regional: instead of dividing the collection by geography, the galleries run in twelve chronological chapters from prehistory to the present, placing objects from different civilisations side by side, so that the story reads as one of shared themes rather than of separate traditions. The collection includes works by painters from Jacques-Louis David to Monet, Van Gogh and Matisse.

The most memorable moments, though, are outside the galleries: the plaza under the centre of the dome at midday, when the pattern of light is sharpest, and the waterside at dusk, when the dome turns into a dark filigree against the sky.

Getting there

The museum is on Saadiyat Island, about 9 km from central Abu Dhabi and reached by road or taxi. Zayed International Airport (AUH) is about 27 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the United Arab Emirates 7The Most Remarkable Museums 93The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is an art museum located on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It runs under an agreement between the UAE and France, signed in March 2007, that allows it to use the Louvre's name until 2047, and has been described by the Louvre as "France's largest cultural project abroad." It is approximately 24,000 square metres (260,000 ft2) in size, with 8,000 square metres (86,000 ft2) of galleries, making it the largest art museum in the Arabian Peninsula. Artworks from around the world are showcased at the museum, with stated intent to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western art. Louvre Abu Dhabi is one of the first completed projects of the Saadiyat Cultural District, which Abu Dhabi intends to develop into "a leading destination for art, history and culture."

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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