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About the Louvre Abu Dhabi: For a Global History of Art?

“Musée-musées” Study Day

Wednesday 18 June / from 10 am to 6.30 pm

In cooperation with Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority (TCA) and Agence France-Muséums.

In conjunction with the exhibition “Birth of a Museum. Louvre Abu Dhabi” until 28 July, Louvre, Hall Napoleon.

ProgrammIntroduction 2

Born of an Intergovernmental Agreement between the United Arab Emirates and France signed in March 2007, the Louvre Abu Dhabi is currently in construction and set to open in the Saadiyat Cultural District in late 2015. By calling upon different disciplines (Philosophy, History, History of Art), the aim of this symposium is to focus on some of the methodological challenges raised by a global thinking approach to the History of Art. Is it possible and how does one adopt a global thinking approach to the History of Art? These questions, essential for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, pursue the analysis and the exchanges entered into at the Louvre Auditorium in 2009 on Abu Dhabi, the Capital under construction, and then in 2011, on the challenges of the universal museum. By bringing together some of cultural globalisation’s great thinkers, it also proposes an examination of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project that bases its discourse and museography on the decompartmentalisation of the curatorial departments and the juxtaposition of works from a wide variety of geographic and cultural origins.

10 am Openingby Jean-Luc Martinez, president-director of the Louvre Museum

10.10 am Inaugural Lecture: Universality and the Cultural Gapby François Jullien, Philosopher, sinologist, hellenist, Paris

I. The Louvre Abu Dhabi at the Time of Cultural Globalisation

11.15 am History and Update on the Project by a Representative of TCA Abu Dhabi and Vincent Pomarède, Louvre Museum

12 am Open Perspectives Through the Decompartmentalisation of Collections by Jean-François Charnier, Agence France-Muséums

12.30 pm Questions

II. Connected histories in the museum

2.30 pm Between Paris and Patna: For a Connected History by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, UCLA / Collège de France

3.15 pm Asian Arts and Islamic Arts: Overlapping Perspectives by Sophie Makariou, musée national des Arts asiatiques- Guimet, and Souraya Noujaim, Agence France-Muséums

4 pm Questions

4.30 pm Thinking of the Renaissance Differently: Exchanges and Renewals Put to the Test of World Historyby Patrick Boucheron, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne

5.10 pm Towards a Global World: Presentation of the Section “XVth-mid XIXth Century” of the Louvre Abu Dhabiby Jérôme Delaplanche, Agence France-Muséums

5.45 pm Questions and conclusionby Doris Behrens-Abouseif, SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies), London University

1 / Saadiyat Cultural District Masterplan © Courtesy of TDIC

Cover / Muhammad B. Ahmad B. Lahsan al-Battûtî, Planispheric astrolabe, Morocco, ah 1139 (1726-1727), diam. 22 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum © Louvre Abu Dhabi / TDIC / APF – Thierry Ollivier

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I. The Louvre Abu Dhabi at the Time of Cultural Globalisation

11.15 am

History and Update on the Projectby a Representative of TCA Abu Dhabi and Vincent Pomarède, Louvre

A graduate of the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and the École du Louvre, former pupil of the École nationale du patrimoine, Vincent Pomarède is Senior Curator, and has been, since January 2014, Director of Mediation and Cultural Programming at the Louvre. Since 2003 he was in charge there of the Paintings Department after having been Director of the Musée des Beaux-arts in Lyon (2000-2003), Curator at the Paintings Department of the Louvre (1991-2000) and Deputy Head of the Restoration Department of classified and controlled museums (1987-1991). He is the author of numerous publications, in particular on French painting from the XIXth century and has curated many exhibitions such as “Corot” (Paris, Grand Palais / Ottawa, National Fine

Arts Museum of Canada / New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), “Delacroix, the Last Years” (Paris, Grand Palais / Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1998), “Maestà di Roma. French Artists in Rome from Ingres to Degas” (Rome, Villa Médicis, 2003), “Ingres” (Louvre, 2006), as well as “Birth of a Museum. Louvre Abu Dhabi” (Louvre Museum, 2014) with Laurence des Cars et Khalid Abdulkhaliq Abdulla. In 2012, with Jean-Luc Martinez, he was curator of the first edition of the Galerie du Temps at the Louvre-Lens Museum.

12 pm

Open Perspectives through the Decompartmentalisation of Collectionsby Jean-François Charnier

The Louvre Abu Dhabi wishes to go further than the decompartmentalisation of museum collections by organizing dialogues between works in the shape of juxtapositions. Hence, once the partition walls come down, what story do the works tell one another? The juxtapositions invite the onlooker, thanks to the curiosity that is sharpened by the unexpected

10 am

Openingby Jean-Luc Martinez

10.10 am

Inaugural Lecture: Universality and the Cultural Gapby François Jullien

François Jullien is Professor at University Paris Diderot, and holds the Chair of “Otherness” at the Collège d’études mondiales of the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris. He has devoted his academic work to exploring the relations between Chinese thought and European philosophy, seeking other kinds of intelligibility in the Far East. He has published a large number of books, most recent amongst which are particularly relevant to our symposium: On the Universal, the Uniform, the Ordinary and Dialogue between Cultures (Polity Press 2014, 1st edn in French, Fayard, 2008), Cette étrange idée du beau (Grasset, 2010), L’écart et l’entre. Leçon inaugurale de la Chaire sur l’altérité (Galilée, 2012), Vivre de paysage ou l’impensé de la raison (Gallimard, 2014).

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Jean-François Charnier has been Scientific Director of Agence France-Muséums since 2013. He joined Agence France-Muséums in January 2008 as Curator in charge of Archaeology. After studying pre- and protohistoric archaeology at the École du Louvre, followed by studies in ethnoarchaeology at University Paris X Nanterre, he entered the École nationale du patrimoine (ENP), graduating in 1994. After leaving the ENP, he was put in charge of the activities linked to preventive archaeology in the Pays de la Loire region, then, in 2000 he joined the Musée national des Arts and Traditions populaires. In 2006 he took up the position of policy director for archaeological repositories and relations with the Direction des Musées de France at the Direction de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. Jean-François Charnier has published numerous articles in the field of European archaeology and Mediterranean ethnology and produced several documentary films on ethnographic themes.

12.30 pm

Questions

II. Connected histories in the museum

2.30 pm

Between Paris and Patna: For a Connected Historyby Sanjay Subrahmanyam

The visual representation of India in the West goes back quite a long way but major changes took place as of 1 500 with the arrival of the Portuguese in the Asian seas. It was not however until the XVIIth century that it was possible to see the development of real Indian art collections in Europe, either in the Netherlands or in Italy. Things moved a lot faster in the other direction. We know that already at the time of the first Mongol emperors, such as Humayun (1508-56), European engravings and images had already begun to circulate in Muslim India. In the XVIIth century, this process took on considerable importance, as we see in the paintings of Jahangir and Shahjahan from the time. The lecture uses both texts and images to focus on the circulation patterns of these images.

Since 2004, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has been Professor of Indian History at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), where he founded and directed the Centre for India and South Asia. Born and trained in Delhi, he began his teaching career in Economic History at the Delhi School of Economics of the University of Delhi. From 1995 to 2002, he taught in Paris at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, before joining the University of Oxford as Chair in History and Indian Culture. He is one of the promoters of “Connected History”, seeing in globalisations a sum of interactions rather than a process invented by the West. His knowledge of many languages (Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, English, French, Portugese, Spanish, Italian and German) enables him to cross-check different sources, notably using archives. His biography,

coming together of the shapes, to continuously question established meanings – to tell untold stories that only the museum has the secret of. As Jean Nouvel says, the newness of the museographic narrative of the Louvre Abu Dhabi resides in the strength of the “magnetism” triggered by the coming together of works from different cultures. The vis-à-vis brought about is an invitation to participate in a conceptual unlocking of the history of civilizations in a global vision that the monographic approach refuses to see. The visual comparison, that naturally picks up on the formal consistencies and perceives the differences, paves the way for the dialectic of what is common and specific. It questions any matches and underscores any specific features. The museum collections reveal an infinite number of formal consistencies, codes or shared symbols. These consistencies are all symptoms of material or immaterial communications, borrowings and permanent reinter- pretations that highlight specific creations or cultural identities as momentary syntheses.

1 / Roman Head, Rome, late IId c. AD, gilded bronze, 44 x 34 x 35 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum © Louvre Abu Dhabi / TDIC / APF – Thierry Ollivier

2 / Standing Bodhisattva (Maitreya?), detail of the head, perhaps Takht-i-Bahı or Sahrı-Bahlol, Gandhara region, present-day Pakistan, IId-IIIrd c. AD, Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum © Louvre Abu Dhabi / TDIC / APF – Thierry Ollivier

Arts as well as those from China. It is here, through the overlapping perspectives of China and Islam, that these wonderful networks of exchange and influence will be examined. The same networks have nourished creation from East to West since the first Islamic centuries through to the modern era.

After studying History of Art at the École du Louvre, History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and Classical Arabic at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, Sophie Makariou joined the École nationale du patrimoine in 1993 and became Curator in the Louvre Department of Oriental Antiquities in 1994. After managing the first large multimedia encyclopedia project for the Louvre, she was in charge of the prefiguration of the Islamic Arts Department created in 2003 and piloted the project to design and redeploy the collections presented in a new wing that was inaugurated in September 2012. Her research and teaching at the École du Louvre focused in particular on inter-culturality, the circulation and welcome accorded to works from one area of civilisation to another, from the medieval West to Islam and from Islam to China. She left her position as Director of the Islamic Arts Department in September 2013 after having been appointed President of the Guimet Museum. She is a member of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Scientific Committee.

Souraya Noujaim joined Agence France-Muséums in November 2013 as a Researcher for Islamic Arts in order to contribute to the development of the Islamic Art collections and the museographic programme of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Specialised in Arabic Epigraphy and Palaeography, she is the author of the catalogue raisonné of the collection of deniers, counter weights, stamps and other glass disks from the Islamic Arts Department from the Louvre. Her current field of studies focuses on the

epigraphed poems of the Nasrid palaces of the Alhambra, as well as the translation challenges linked to cultural research and mediation. In charge of classes at the École du Louvre, she is responsible for teaching the general history of Islamic Arts.

4 pm

Questions

4.30 pm

Thinking of the Renaissance Differently: Exchanges and Renewals Put to the Test of World Historyby Patrick Boucheron

The notion of “Renaissance”, because it is tied to the History of Art, but also more generally speaking to a heritage-based understanding of History, refers to the treasure of accumulated beauties. But as soon as one defines it as a revolution of objects, affecting above all the ostentatious consumption of luxury goods, the perspective moves and widens. It broadens to include the widened horizons of World History, which means putting to the test the exclusively European nature of the notion of “Renaissance”. In his book Vermeer’s Hat, the historian Timothy Brook brilliantly demonstrated that global history was not condemned to painting vast, poorly documented frescoes but could get as close as possible to faces and landscapes. We will hence propose to follow the journey of several objects – from Chinese porcelain to Italian portraits – to suggest the way in which connected History today makes it possible to restore the full thickness of the world.

Patrick Boucheron is Professor in Medieval History at the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. His interest in the “World history” lies in his desire to renew the writing of History. He edited, together with

entitled The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama (Alma Éditeur, 2012 in French; 1st edition in English, Cambridge University Press, 1997) won him international acclaim. Among his latest publications, one may also quote: Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (University Press of New England, 2011; edn in French, Alma Éditeur, 2013), Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in early Modern Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2012) and Is ’Indian Civilization’ a Myth? Fictions and Histories (Permanent Black, 2013). In 2013, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, was elected Professor in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France in Paris, where he has just completed a cycle of lectures “Thinking About the World in the Seventeenth Century: An Imperfect History”.

3.15 pm

Asian Arts and Islamic Arts: Overlapping Perspectivesby Sophie Makariou and Souraya Noujaim

Since the Parthian and Sassanid periods, the Iranian world has been the central pivot for exchanges between China and the Near and Middle East. At the beginning of the VIIIth century, with Islamic expansion, the amount of contact increased when the Arab and Iranian navigators, searching for new commercial routes, overcame the navigation difficulties in the South China Sea and in the Persian Gulf region and established trading posts in the Middle Kingdom. As a consequence, the flourishing trade routes for ceramics and textiles led to an unprecedented flow and dissemination of objects, techniques and patterns. In the middle of the XIIIth century, the Mongol conquests had a considerable impact on the land and maritime flows and sustainably marked the development of Islamic

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5.10 pm

Towards a Global World: Presentation of the Section “XVth-mid XIXth Century”of the Louvre Abu Dhabiby Jérôme Delaplanche

The aim of the permanent collections of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is to offer visitors a discourse that is both chronological and thematic. The works and their presentation tell a global story of art and civilisations based on a journey that is comprised of twelve thematic galleries, divided up over four chronological wings, from Antiquity through to the modern day. The third of these wings, dedicated to the period that extends from the great journeys around the globe in around 1500 to the Industrial Revolution in the middle of the XIXth century, hence

groups together three thematic galleries. The themes have been chosen to showcase the specific contribution of the different civilisations to the outreach of artistic creation around the world. One of the principles chosen for the presentation of the works in the museum is the juxtaposition of works from cultures that are seemingly very different but that dialogue together intensely from a formal and intellectual perspective. This conference hence proposes to present some of these ‘coming togethers’ that are designed to create a spark of curiosity in the eye of the visitor.

Holder of a Doctorate in the History of Art (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Jérôme Delaplanche specialised in the study of French Painting from the XVIIth and XVIIIth century. In 2004, he published a monograph on the

Julien Loiseau, Pierre Monnet and Yann Potin, an Histoire du monde au XVe siècle (Fayard, 2009; new edn Pluriel 2012). Among his latest publications: L’entretemps. Conversations sur l’histoire (Verdier, 2012), Inventer le monde. Une histoire globale du XVe siècle (Documentation française, 2012), Conjurer la peur. Sienne, 1338. Essai sur la force politique des images (Seuil, 2013), and Pour une histoire-monde (P. Boucheron and N. Delalande (ed.), PUF, 2013).

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Jean-Baptiste Pillement, Scène chinoise, 1765-1767, oil on canvas, 199 x 227 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum © Louvre Abu Dhabi / TDIC / APF

painter Noël-Nicolas Coypel. His doctoral thesis dedicated to Joseph Parrocel, battle painter at the time of Louis XIV, was published in 2006. He went on to specialise in the study of battle painting and resided at the Académie de France in Rome (Villa Médicis) to work on this question. This research led to several articles and a book entitled Peindre la guerre (Nicolas Chaudun, 2009). In addition to his research activity, he has taught History of Art since 2000 in various institutions (École du Louvre, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Université Aix-Marseille I, Institut Catholique de Paris). In January 2008, he joined Agence France-Muséums for the Louvre Abu Dhabi project as a Researcher for the period from the XVth to the XVIIIth century.

5.45 pm

Questions and conclusionby Doris Behrens-Abouseif

Doris Behrens-Abouseif is Nasser D. Khalili Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University. She has previously taught Islamic art and architecture at universities in Egypt (American University of Cairo), Germany (Universities of Freiburg, Munich, Bamberg and Freie Universität in Berlin), and the United States (Harvard University). She is a specialist in Mamluk and Ottoman arts of Egypt and Syria and in social history. Her research interests include urbanism, Islamic cultural history and concepts of aesthetics, the decorative arts of Islam and later Islamic painting. Her recent publications include: Cairo of the Mamluks: A History of Architecture and its Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2008) and Practicing Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate: Gifts and Material Culture in the Medieval Islamic World (I.B. Tauris, 2014).

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En partenariat média avecLe Figaro, France Inter, RFI, France 24, Monte Carlo Doualiya, CNN International.

Informations : 01 40 20 55 55et sur www.louvre.fr

Réservation : 01 40 20 55 00

Programmation: Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau assistée de Nanxi Cheng et Ilana Weinreich /

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