Breaking a New Path for Modern Arab Art - ARTINFO.com
Breaking a New Path for Modern Arab Art - ARTINFO.com
DOHA—Although Qatar is but a speck on the map, everyone from Jeff Koons to Miucca Prada showed up in Doha recently for the opening of the Arab Museum of Modern Art, housed in a 60,000-square-foot former school. On one side of the building is a new government-sponsored development known as "Education City"; on the other, sand as far as the eye can see. The museum is all white and absurdly clean. Dirtiness is unwelcome in the kingdom, much like democracy.
I had traveled to Doha for the opening thinking I would find a parochial institution devoted to a regional variant of modern art — in short, nothing terribly interesting. Instead, I encountered some extraordinary artwork housed in an ultramodernist setting, and I returned to New York feeling that I had caught a glimpse of the future of the Middle East. The Arab Museum of Modern Art is a sophisticated and cosmopolitan place celebrating international artistic trends as well as the sites of production of modern and contemporary Arab art from the 1840s through the present. There are even one or two nudes on view.
Credit for this visionary and long-overdue institution goes to Sheik Hassan bin Mohammad bin Ali Al Thani, vice chairman of the Qatar Museums Authority and the founder of the museum. The sheik spent two decades collecting the more than 6,000 works, which are the basis of the museum's collection. "Nobody knows what Arab art is," he told me. "It is one of the least studied and understood areas in art." He hopes that the museum will help change that.
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It is easy to be cynical about cultural projects in the Gulf — oil-rich sheiks pouring easy money into trophy buildings and stellar acquisitions that generate headlines. That is true of nearby Abu Dhabi, where branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre will soon open. But the Arab Museum of Modern Art is something different, and, in a way, something better. It is the first museum in the region where people can come to see and learn about the creations of Arab artists of the modern era and our own time. It is not a Western institution opening an outpost for Western art, but a real showcase for local culture and history.
In a way, too, what Sheik Hassan and other members of the ruling royal family are doing in Qatar is not dissimilar to what American collectors did a century ago. Think of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who founded New York's Whitney Museum of American Art to create a dedicated home for the collection and display of modern art made in the United States. (She did so only after the Metropolitan Museum of Art turned down her generous offer to donate her collection of modern American artworks assembled over 25 years.) That was in 1931. One can only imagine what the Arab Museum of Modern Art will look like in 80 years.
The Qatar museum — referred to locally as Mathaf, a word meaning "museum" in Arabic, and branded that way on its Web site — is presenting three exhibitions of modern and contemporary Arab art. The first, "Sajjil: Act of Recording," is a survey show of about 250 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper (but no photographs, surprisingly) from the collection. The work is divided into 10 themes and spread across 12 galleries of different sizes on two levels of the building.
Though the galleries are mostly well laid out and functional, the lighting throughout the museum is inconsistent. So too is the quality of the displays, which seem to have been selected in order to illustrate curatorial themes rather than show off the talents of the artists. Too often, first-rate works are grouped with vastly inferior ones. If the idea behind the opening exhibition was to show off the quality and originality of modern Arab artists, then, sadly, it failed.
Putting this complaint aside, the new museum nonetheless delivers on its stated promise to open up for dialogue and discussion new perspectives on modern and contemporary Arab art. It hints in places at certain commonalities of attitude and reference among regional Arab artists that may indeed justify a discussion of a collective "Arab identity" — a contested concept in the Islamic world. In this regard the show will be of great interest to Middle Eastern art scholars.
DOHA—Although Qatar is but a speck on the map, everyone from Jeff Koons to Miucca Prada showed up in Doha recently for the opening of the Arab Museum of Modern Art, housed in a 60,000-square-foot former school. On one side of the building is a new government-sponsored development known as "Education City"; on the other, sand as far as the eye can see. The museum is all white and absurdly clean. Dirtiness is unwelcome in the kingdom, much like democracy.
I had traveled to Doha for the opening thinking I would find a parochial institution devoted to a regional variant of modern art — in short, nothing terribly interesting. Instead, I encountered some extraordinary artwork housed in an ultramodernist setting, and I returned to New York feeling that I had caught a glimpse of the future of the Middle East. The Arab Museum of Modern Art is a sophisticated and cosmopolitan place celebrating international artistic trends as well as the sites of production of modern and contemporary Arab art from the 1840s through the present. There are even one or two nudes on view.
Credit for this visionary and long-overdue institution goes to Sheik Hassan bin Mohammad bin Ali Al Thani, vice chairman of the Qatar Museums Authority and the founder of the museum. The sheik spent two decades collecting the more than 6,000 works, which are the basis of the museum's collection. "Nobody knows what Arab art is," he told me. "It is one of the least studied and understood areas in art." He hopes that the museum will help change that.
Like what you see? Sign up for ARTINFO's weekly newsletter to get the latest on the market, emerging artists, auctions, galleries, museums, and more.
It is easy to be cynical about cultural projects in the Gulf — oil-rich sheiks pouring easy money into trophy buildings and stellar acquisitions that generate headlines. That is true of nearby Abu Dhabi, where branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre will soon open. But the Arab Museum of Modern Art is something different, and, in a way, something better. It is the first museum in the region where people can come to see and learn about the creations of Arab artists of the modern era and our own time. It is not a Western institution opening an outpost for Western art, but a real showcase for local culture and history.
In a way, too, what Sheik Hassan and other members of the ruling royal family are doing in Qatar is not dissimilar to what American collectors did a century ago. Think of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who founded New York's Whitney Museum of American Art to create a dedicated home for the collection and display of modern art made in the United States. (She did so only after the Metropolitan Museum of Art turned down her generous offer to donate her collection of modern American artworks assembled over 25 years.) That was in 1931. One can only imagine what the Arab Museum of Modern Art will look like in 80 years.
The Qatar museum — referred to locally as Mathaf, a word meaning "museum" in Arabic, and branded that way on its Web site — is presenting three exhibitions of modern and contemporary Arab art. The first, "Sajjil: Act of Recording," is a survey show of about 250 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper (but no photographs, surprisingly) from the collection. The work is divided into 10 themes and spread across 12 galleries of different sizes on two levels of the building.
Though the galleries are mostly well laid out and functional, the lighting throughout the museum is inconsistent. So too is the quality of the displays, which seem to have been selected in order to illustrate curatorial themes rather than show off the talents of the artists. Too often, first-rate works are grouped with vastly inferior ones. If the idea behind the opening exhibition was to show off the quality and originality of modern Arab artists, then, sadly, it failed.
Putting this complaint aside, the new museum nonetheless delivers on its stated promise to open up for dialogue and discussion new perspectives on modern and contemporary Arab art. It hints in places at certain commonalities of attitude and reference among regional Arab artists that may indeed justify a discussion of a collective "Arab identity" — a contested concept in the Islamic world. In this regard the show will be of great interest to Middle Eastern art scholars.
