Abu Dhabi mounts $3bn Picasso exhibition and plans a cultural revolution
Yesterday I drove from Dubai to Abu Dhabi with my wife in 38C to see the Picasso exhibition that runs until September 4th at the Emirates Palace Hotel. Entrance is free, and I suppose a broad brush estimate of the worth of the 188 works on display would be around $3 billion, almost as much as it cost to build this extraordinary hotel.
Abu Dhabi is going big on culture these days. Another exhibition in the Emirates Palace has a collection of models and plans for the Sadiyaat Island mega-project, a multi-billion museum park. There is a Guggenheim that looks like the contents of a just emptied trash-can; a centre for the performing arts that is straight out of a science fiction film; and a museum to house works leased from the Paris Louvre and shaped like a giant saucer.
This is certainly going to liven up the monotonous 1970s concrete architecture of Abu Dhabi, and I suppose the Picasso exhibition with works from the Paris museum of Picasso is a sign of things to come.
Even in his own life-time Picasso arose strong feelings pro and anti and several decades after his death the passion of his art is undeniable. There is a desire to encapsulate emotion and not mere form. Indeed, form is often lost amid the power of the emotions.
But Picasso could actually paint. The exhibition has a startlingly realistic representation of his wife Olga (seen above) as well as the alarmingly contorted depictions of some other members of his harem.
The sculpture is similarly varied with heads disfigured by phallic symbols and an odd nanny goat crafted from household objects and then cast in bronze. Was Picasso making a joke of art or trying to tell us something serious? Perhaps he did both and made a huge fortune from his efforts.
Picasso remains an enigma and Abu Dhabi wants to be seen as more than an oil reserve. Yet for most of Picasso’s life Abu Dhabi was a tiny village on the edge of the Persian Gulf with an impoverished population. As late as 1966 Sheikh Shakhbut was deposed because he refused planning permission for the first concrete building in Abu Dhabi.
But it is a mark of just how far Abu Dhabi has advanced that Western culture can now be imported to a building of world-class like the Emirates Palace Hotel, and soon to a dedicated island of museums.
