It’s official: the Louvre Abu Dhabi will open at the end of 2016, a full year later than previously announced and a decade after the contract was signed for the €1bn project on Saadiyat Island. The delay was confirmed on Tuesday 16 June during a press briefing at the Louvre by the museum’s president, Jean-Luc Martinez.
The Gulf outpost had stalled for almost six years before the project was rescued by Martinez. The French architect Jean Nouvel has promised to deliver the building next spring, although no exact date has been provided. (His agency declined to comment on the delay.)
It will then take at least three months to install the collection, according to the curator Jean-François Charnier, who is overseeing the hang in Abu Dhabi. “November and December are the most likely dates right now,” says an Abu Dhabi source, speaking on the phone on the condition of anonymity. “Fixing an exact date will depend on the heads of state,” he says, but he pointed to 2 December, National Day in the United Arab Emirates, as a possibility.
The emirate is still buying work, “mostly to fill gaps in the collection”, Charnier says, but the curator plans to organise a series of small exhibitions at the Manarat Al Saadiyat of the Abu Dhabi museum’s latest acquisitions, starting in July with a show of manuscripts, from early Korans to medieval Christian texts, and another in August centred on sculptures of “immortal figures”, from Nepal to Papua New Guinea.
