Abu Dhabi – Have you ever felt when visiting a museum for the second or third time that you were at a new place? So late last year I was at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, after having visited it for the first time back in 2018, and I saw a whole different museum. There were, of course, some piece changes and some temporary exhibitions, but beyond that, I realized that a new visit is an opportunity to see from another perspective, a new moment in time, and a new maturity what had already been appreciated before. So last December, I visited the same Louvre Abu Dhabi, but a new one, too.
My visit to the Louvre Abu Dhabi of six years ago had been quick, one evening amid a series of work appointments. I couldn’t see it all, so I lingered at a beautiful children’s exhibition I wrote about at the time. I had some time to take a coffee on the patio of the museum, and some charming cats wandered nearby. On my newest visit, a cat was also strolling by the entrance of the museum when I arrived. I felt at home. For those who don’t know, cats are some of preferred pets of the Arabs.
There are so many beautiful things in the Louvre Abu Dhabi, but I won’t describe them all here but focus only on what impacted me the most. I’m no art expert. The pieces exhibited at the Arab museum this time spoke to my heart about the humankind and made me reflect upon our collective path as people and the transience of here and now. There is so much of those who crossed this land before me at Louvre Abu Dhabi. Others will come and discover even more, sculpt even more, paint new reflections, or even maybe make a whole new type of art, whose word to describe it we don’t even have yet. Will they be in Abu Dhabi? It seems like they will.
The gold death masks exhibited at the Louvre hooked me as soon as I entered the museum. And I believe that being there in the first steps into the visit, they make a point about our undisputable oneness as humankind. The use of the gold death masks was recorded in different places around the world, including Syria and Lebanon from 600 to 300 BC, Peru from 100 BC to 700 AD, and the Philippines from 900 to 1,200 AD, according to the exhibit.
Did someone send out a memo sharing the practice for this to happen? I don’t think so. Besides the message about how we are who we are, the gold masks at Louvre Abu Dhabi and elsewhere speak of the hope we all have. “Gold glows in the gloom of tombs but only bones have been found behind these masks. Immortality appears to be the universal hope of mankind when faced with death,” says an information plaque on the death object.
Some rooms ahead, how can you not pause before Ramesses II, breath in and enjoy its beauty? The lettering says that is Ramesses II in a conventional pose that indicates its status as the pharaoh. The museum also describes the beard, the throne, the collar. But in front of the image, I find beauty in seeing those times from afar, the years that were harsh for some and luscious for others. And I think, “I’m glad we got here, Ramesses II.” In the times of Ramesses, could I as a communicator talk to Ramesses? To the Louvre pharaoh, though, I can.
My new Louvre Abu Dhabi had a dragon, a beautiful bronze dragon in the middle of the room, being photographed. The words written about it say it is an imaginary hybrid creature made of various real animals: an alligator, a bird of prey, a feline, a deer. But for me that dragon can also be the representation of all the cartoons that I watched and stories I heard about that creature. Depending on the angle it is photographed, it is big and boasts the power of the imagination that created it. If the focus and distance are different, it becomes small, a single piece in the Louvre de Abu Dhabi. In a museum that talks about humankind, it makes sense that it is there as a dragon of all of us.
In the Louvre of 2023, I also looked at the religious stained glass. They are full of color, and my eyes could linger there as they depict a scene of peace and closeness for me. In some paintings or pieces of a museum, I feel at home, like I did with the cat outside. So it happens with the stained glass. The explanation alongside the piece talks about the light and its connection to the spirituality since ancient times, discourses on how the light crosses the stained glasses of Christian cathedrals representing the Divine.
Neoclassical art is also at the Louvre of December 2023, so are acclaimed paintings appreciated by the world in a beautiful room. “Wind Effect, Series of The Poplars” by Claude Monet is one of them. The museum I charted for myself in this visit had all of these, but I wanted to see up close a beautiful composition of pots from Saudi Arabia.
These pots were also the Louvre Abu Dhabi of this visit for me. The description says that the pots used for making goat stew are blackened by the use on the fire. Maha Malluh, the author of the piece, made it as a visual poem in tribute of the classical Arabic poetry. There is beauty in the dents left by use on the Saudi pots.
Are the marks of time and of those who we’ve become that make us see a visited and revisited museum from a new perspective? A museum like the Louvre Abu Dhabi brings a vastness of art and history that you can’t even capture in a single visit. The next time you go there, take your time, look at the cats nearby if you like animals, and try and make your own Arab Louvre. What reaches into you, the art before your eyes, is the museum you’ll take with you.
The journalist traveled at the invitation of the Embassy of UAE in Brasília
Translation by Guilherme Miranda
