Louvre Abu Dhabi: A universal museum bridging cultures and time

Abu Dhabi: Ahmed Jamal Omar Alyafai had meant to sit for five minutes. His feet hurt after hours of showing a friend around, and in one of the quieter rooms there was a bench and a few big paintings that nobody seemed to be looking at.

So, he sat down.

Twenty-five minutes later he was still there, studying the same canvas, with the odd sense of seeing it through the painter’s eyes.

He is 23, he rides motorcycles, and by his own account he is not really a museum person.

Yet he keeps coming back to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, about once a year, because the walls never quite stay the same.

Back to where it all started

That a Louvre exist here at all began with a signature on 6 March 2007.

France and the United Arab Emirates put their names to an intergovernmental agreement that would give the Arab world its first universal museum.

The most famous name in the museum world would travel south, bringing with it works both ancient and contemporary, chosen for their historic, cultural and sociological interest from every part of the globe.

It took a small army to make it happen. Thirteen French public institutions gathered under the umbrella of Agence France-Muséums, among them the Louvre itself, the Centre Pompidou, Versailles and the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Rodin and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Then came the question of where to put it all. The architect, Jean Nouvel, a winner of the Pritzker Prize, took his cue from the site rather than from any museum he had seen: Saadiyat Island, a virgin lagoon between sand and sea, between shade and light.

What to find inside

What visitors find inside is a deliberate act of mixing.

The galleries do not sort the world by country. They follow time and theme and set civilisations side by side that, at first glance, seem to have little in common.

Some 700 artworks and groups of artworks belong to the museum, spanning prehistory to the present.

Another 300 or so are loans from its French partners, and every year the Louvre sends 100 different masterpieces. The collection keeps shifting, and Ahmed is not the only one who has noticed.

“It is not the same art every time you go,” The 23-year-old said, who first came as a 15-year-old in 2018 or 2019 and has returned about five times since.

He is, by his own admission, not a museum person. “I am more of an outdoorsy person: motorcycles, bikes, racing.” What draws him back is the quiet.

“Sometimes I just need some quiet, and that place generally gave me the peace I was looking for.”

On his latest visit, he was showing a friend around for the first time. After hours on his feet, he found a lone bench in a nearly empty room, with a few large paintings that passing visitors were ignoring.

I wanted to sit for five minutes. I ended up sitting there for a good 25 minutes, just looking at the same painting,” he says. “I felt like I was experiencing what the painter was experiencing while he was doing it.”

What keeps surprising him is how the museum handles its crowds. Large tour groups are a constant, yet “they always manage it perfectly,” he said, so visitors seeking calm are rarely disturbed.

Each gallery feels like a different era, and some are built around a single artefact. He also enjoys the Islamic manuscripts and the works brought in from collections around the world, including from the Louvre in Paris.

A special place in the heart

For 25-year-old Nabaa Al Ahmad, the Louvre Abu Dhabi was a beginning. She arrived in the UAE at the start of 2024, and the museum was among the first places she visited.

“It has a special place in my heart,” she said. “It was one of the first things I did here, and it was a wild experience.”

What struck her was how naturally the art fitted its setting. “To be able to connect this kind of art with Abu Dhabi, it shows how much the country and the city care about showing that there is an incredible atmosphere for culture and for cultures,” she says.

“There is art in every possible form, for people of every taste.”

The floating dome

From a distance, the dome seems to float. A big silvery disc appears to float above the museum-city, and it is the first thing a visitor sees, whether arriving by land or by sea. Underneath it, the light does something unexpected. It doesn’t pour in. It falls in pieces.

It is a geometric structure of 7,850 stars, repeated at different sizes and angles across eight layers. Four outer layers are clad in stainless steel and four inner layers in aluminium, separated by a steel frame five metres high. A ray of sun must pass through every layer before it appears, and then it disappears again. The result is a shifting scatter of light on the white walls and the water below, which Nouvel himself calls a “rain of light.”

The dome is 180 metres across and rests on only four piers, each 110 metres apart. It rises 36 metres above ground level. The roof was inspired by the cupola, a distinctive feature of Arabic architecture, and the pattern is a tribute to the palm trees of Abu Dhabi. There is a practical side too. The dome also shades the buildings beneath it, and Nouvel has said it creates a microclimate.