‘There’s this amazing flint hand axe in our collection,’ says Manuel Rabaté, director of Louvre Abu Dhabi, showing me a picture in the guide to his museum. ‘It dates from between 500,000 and 200,000 BCE and you can see that it represents a point where tools were beginning to be made in an aesthetic way. This is not just a functional instrument. It has been formed to have beauty too. Consciously.’
We are in Istanbul for Sixty Years of Art, a panel discussion that is being held in the atmospheric cistern below the streets of this capital city that sits literally at the crossroads of the East and West. Speakers who specialise in the art of the Asiatic, Levant and North African region have been invited to this sixth-century vault – all pillars and archways and running water – to discuss the importance of Arab and Eastern art. The conversation marks the publication of a new book, Art Here by Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille.
Richard Mille has embraced the art of the Arab region, publishing an edition of Art Here annually to celebrate the art prize it initiated with Louvre Abu Dhabi for up-and-coming artists based in the GCC and Japan in 2025. The award is also open to artists based in MENA and connected to the GCC region.
‘The point is,’ Rabaté continues, warming to his theme, ‘this ancient axe is like a Richard Mille watch – which is a tool for telling the time but made in a way to express man’s creativity and artisan skill and appreciation of aesthetics’. He goes on to explain that the art prize came about after he met Peter Harrison, CEO of Richard Mille Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and took him through the Louvre Abu Dhabi to explain its ethos.
An extraordinary structure based on a medina and created by “starchitect” Jean Nouvel, the museum opened in 2017 and incorporates an enormous 180-metre-wide dome of 7,850 metal stars of different sizes and set at different angles that filter light, much in the same way that a Richard Mille watch filters light through its skeleton insides.
From the outset, the Louvre Abu Dhabi was conceived to disrupt. ‘If the Louvre in Paris is a dictionary, we are a documentary,’ says Rabaté, who worked at the Paris museum before leading the build and development of the project in the UAE. ‘We are truly a new type of museum. The first universal museum of the Arab world, for sure, but also a place where the exhibits are freed from the constraints of geography and chronology, and exhibited together to inform a new narrative, away from the usual classifications.’
The purpose, he says, is to emphasise what we have in common, to share ‘ideas and ideals comprehensible to all, regardless of background or beliefs’.
This is perfectly illustrated in a room where 4,000-year-old Arabian rock art is exhibited alongside Cy Twombly’s 2008 Untitled I-IX. The ancient forms, from Asir in southwest Saudi Arabia, are thought to have been engraved by nomad shepherds, and their geometric lines have a beautiful kinship with Twombly’s “pseudo writing”, the swirling white graphic “script” on a blue background that sees him mark-make in a similar way. The nine gigantic 21st-century canvases are part of a series entitled Notes from Salalah.
One thing Richard Mille recognised in the Abu Dhabi approach was the challenge to the existing idea of a museum as a space where an accepted linear notion of art history is played out, reverentially, through a Western Lens. The Louvre Abu Dhabi does have an extraordinary permanent collection spanning millennia and continents, but it also champions new works. It believes in engaging the community through experiences like a kayak tour on the water surrounding the building, and an immersive rave, held under the museum’s dome.
Richard Mille loves to disrupt, too. From its outset in 2000, the brand jettisoned much of the watch world’s accepted practice, forging modern-looking and high-performance timepieces out of extraordinary materials like ceramic and titanium. These luxury items come on rubber straps, are fun and are worked to be so lightweight that Rafa Nadal even wears his on court.
A 2016 limited edition (the RM 68-01) saw French graffiti street artist Cyril Kongo hand-paint the mechanics of 30 tourbillon watches. Another model – the 2022 manual winding tourbillon RM 47 – comes as a limited edition of 75, featuring a motif of miniature Samurai swords and armour.
This brings to mind a suit of Japanese armour housed in the Louvre Abu Dhabi, made for Shishido Tamaki of the Mori clan of Hagi in Nagato, that dates from a period of peace in Japan that began in the early 17th century. It stands as a ceremonial creation of exquisite craftsmanship. ‘Our pieces are often all about material and craft,’ says Rabaté. ‘We are exploring the relationship between art and artisan.’ They are also from all over the world, with an emphasis on works from the wider Asian region. This is an attempt to rebalance the narrative of art history, says Rabaté, not in a blunt post-colonial way but through a much more nuanced dialogue between pieces.
‘It’s impressive that the region has decided that culture is a pillar of its plan to modernise and grow,’ says Dr Alia Al-Senussi. A Libyan American cultural strategist and noted patron of the arts, in Abu Dhabi for the launch of this year’s Richard Mille Art Prize, Al-Senussi is also a founding member of the Tate’s Acquisitions Committee for the Middle East and North Africa. ‘There is unfortunately a feeling among many in the west that museums like the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the new Guggenheim being built nearby are attempts to somehow “buy” cultural credibility. But this overlooks the fact that they are well attended by the local population with incredibly thoughtful programmes speaking to the local as well as the global.
This critique suggests that the region has no culture of its own, which of course is untrue, as the Louvre Abu Dhabi illustrates.’ She cites Fahrelnissa Zeid, a Turkish artist, as an example of someone who is still relatively unknown in the west, despite being the first woman to have her work exhibited at the ICA in London in 1954, and the subject of a Tate Modern retrospective in 2017.
Another speaker in Istanbul, Dr Ridha Moumni, historian of art and archaeology, talks of how the artists who made it from the Arab world to Europe and the US in the 20th century came back home and, instead of blindly adopting what they had seen in the west, incorporated it into their own work. ‘Mohamed Melehi, a Moroccan Modernist painter who studied in Paris and New York, would tell his pupils in Casablanca that they should look at the design of Moroccan tiles,’ says Moumni. ‘And Hedi Turki, probably the first Abstract painter in North Africa, was a Tunisian who spent time in the US and saw Jackson Pollock and brought back the idea of action painting and abstraction. But in later life he realised his use of thin lines was not a reference to American abstraction and Minimalism but instead he was seeing his grandma when she was creating the traditional textiles of the south of Tunisia.’
These are the stories the Louvre Abu Dhabi is committed to telling and, in partnership with Richard Mille for the Art Here prize, part of a long-term commitment showcasing the artistic talent of the Arab world.
After an open call for submissions, five shortlisted finalists are exhibited under the Art Here banner, with the winner chosen by a jury of art experts, the majority of whom work in the field of Arab art. The theme for the fourth edition of the art prize, in 2024, was “Awakenings”, with an array of thought-provoking entries, including a desert sand-filled beach ball by Emirati artist Lamya Gargash, designed to address human stereotypes, and the winning piece, Landscapes by Tunisian artist Nicène Kossentini, was a video installation of the Tunisian desert, reflecting the impact of humans on life and environment.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi is at Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, UAE; louvreabudhabi.ae; richardmille.com
Peter Howarth has been the style director of British GQ and the editor of Arena, British Esquire and Man About Town. Today, he is the co-founder and CEO of creative agency SHOW Media and the editorial director of Secret Trips
