Inside a UAE's private art collection, valued at $3.3 billion with three Frida Kahlos

Dubai: There is a villa on Jumeirah Road where a Picasso hangs a few steps from a Francis Bacon, and where you will be stopped in front of a bronze dancer and asked to look at her eyes.

Noor Royal Collection is the private collection of Sheikha Somayeh Noor, its founder and chairwoman, valued at $3.3 billion, roughly Dh12 billion. She began collecting nearly two decades ago and opened a dedicated museum wing four years ago.

Ahmed Ech-Chafiy, the collection's artist relations coordinator, led Gulf News through it.

Here is a tour of it looks like.

The gallery's most popular collections are about Frida Kahlo.

According to Ech-Chafiy, It is the only museum in the GCC to hold an original Kahlo, and it holds three. Kahlo is the most expensive female artist in history.

The work on display shows Kahlo with Diego Rivera on her chest and a heart in her hands, with a third eye above, Ech-Chafiy reads as her vision. Rivera, her husband, had an affair with her sister, and the gallery presents the painting as a response to that.

Rivera himself hangs nearby, including a work called La Vida de Zapata, depicting the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata alongside his wife.

The collection says it holds institutional foundation partnerships covering several of its major artists, including Kahlo, Picasso, Pissarro, Rivera, Velázquez, Monet and Renoir.

Elsewhere, a bronze figure by Edgar Degas asks visitors a question before it answers one.

Guests are walked around it and told to watch the eyes. Then comes the reveal: the flat surface beside the figure is a mirror, because dancers rehearsed in front of them before going on stage.

Nearby sits a ruby sculpture from Brazil weighing 27.3kg, at 136,500 carats. It is of Fatima al-Fihri, who founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez in the ninth century, the oldest continuously operating university in the world.

The most interesting stop on the tour is not a painting. It is a frame.

Ech-Chafiy stops at a work called Barracuda with Red Sky and asks what makes a frame original. The answer he gives: a frame is original only if the artist chose it or made it.

In this case the artist made it, and shaped it like a wave. The argument is that the frame carries the meaning. A tsunami in open sea will not harm a fish, but it will destroy anyone on land. Remove the frame and the work loses its point.

Also, the most genius yet the smallest painting in the room is by a blind painter.

Ech-Chafiy's favourite as well it is a Paris landscape attributed to Camille Pissarro, painted in 1890. The story attached to it is that Pissarro had lost his sight by then and painted it from memory rather than imagination, which the guide compares to Beethoven composing while deaf.

A second Pissarro nearby shows Notre-Dame in 1870, before the fire.

The collection moves quickly between periods and continents.

There is a Velázquez portrait of a young prince of Austria, which the gallery says was a gift from King Philip of Spain to the Austrian court, the boy having died at four. There is a Matisse, unusual because it is a sculpture rather than a painting. A De Chirico, a Botero with certificates from the artist's foundation, a Dalí-influenced work, a Cabanel painting about women hunting, framed as an early statement on independence.

An ink work on lambskin dates to the late 15th century, which the gallery says survived 500 years because of the artist's own preservation formula.

There is a Carracci engraving so fine that an American expert reportedly stood in front of it for five minutes before remarking that its maker could have forged currency.

And then, in a different register entirely, there is Muhammad Ali: his gemstones, his fingerprint set in lapis lazuli, two of the eight books the gallery holds from him, and the suit he wore at one of his weddings.

Alongside the European works sits a body of Islamic manuscripts and illuminated Qurans, listed on the collection's website as Ottoman and Moroccan works from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Ech-Chafiy says the holdings include a Quran made from gold, and among them are one of the oldest, the smallest and the longest in the world.

The complete Kiswah, the cloth that covers the Holy Kaaba, is held in Sheikha Somayeh Noor's personal collection. There are also multi-religious icons spanning several centuries.

On its website the Quran collection dates back to the Ottoman and Moroccan era from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

Sheikha's route into art ran through finance, and she has spent her career treating it as an investment category rather than a decorative one.

She is founder, chairwoman and chief executive of Noor Royal Holding, which spans finance, energy, healthcare, art and property, and founder and shareholder of Noor Aafaq Finance and Investment. Her family has been part of the UAE's energy sector since 1959.

This year she received the Art Financing Middle East Trailblazer award at the MEA Business Achievement Awards, and the Iconic Women in Art Investment and Alternative Wealth Strategies award at the Entrepreneurial Elite Awards. She has spoken on art financing at the inaugural 1 Billion Summit, held under the patronage of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

She is also a published author. Success Vitamins came out in 2020, and a second book, on UAE diplomacy and culture, is due soon.

Each year the collection gives the winner of World Art Dubai, the region's largest art fair, a three-day exhibition at the museum, showing emerging work alongside the permanent collection. She holds a Guinness World Records title for the most nationalities painting simultaneously, set at the Global Canvas Art Festival.