Qatar Pursues De Montebello

By KATE TAYLOR, Staff Reporter of the Sun | August 15, 2008

The outgoing director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, may get more deeply involved in museum development projects in the Middle East.

Mr. de Montebello, who will retire at the end of this year or when a successor is named, has already been appointed as a special adviser on NYU Abu Dhabi. He will be involved in visual arts programming and structuring an arts curriculum. But the new executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority, Roger Mandle, acknowledged in an interview that he is also trying to lure Mr. de Montebello to Qatar.

"Philippe's a very good friend of mine," Mr. Mandle said when a reporter brought up Mr. de Montebello and his post at NYU Abu Dhabi. "We've had conversations about what he might do in the rest of the Middle East, as well." Asked if that meant Mr. de Montebello would take a job in Qatar, Mr. Mandle said, "Well, I hope so."

A spokesman for the Met, Harold Holzer, said that Mr. de Montebello was on vacation. He confirmed, however, that Mr. de Montebello and Mr. Mandle "have been talking."

Qatar and Abu Dhabi are currently engaged in a kind of museums arms race, although their approaches are rather different. Last year, Abu Dhabi announced with much fanfare a plan for a cultural district on Saadiyat Island, to include four museums and a performing arts center. It reportedly paid the Louvre and the French government $1.3 billion, and the Guggenheim an undisclosed amount, to use those institutions' names and borrow from their collections for its classical and contemporary art museums. The other museums are a maritime museum and a national museum.

Abu Dhabi engaged a raft of celebrity architects: Frank Gehry for the Guggenheim, Jean Nouvel for the Louvre, Tadao Ando for the maritime museum, and Zaha Hadid for the performing arts center. The first museums — the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum — are scheduled to open in 2012 or 2013. NYU Abu Dhabi, a degree-granting campus paid for by the Abu Dhabi government, will welcome its first students in 2010.

Qatar, meanwhile, has focused on purchasing vast quantities of art to fill up a planned network of museums. The first museum to open is the 377,000-square-foot, I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art, which will be dedicated in November. Mr. Pei took inspiration from Islamic architecture for the massive stone-clad building. The museum's collection of over 700 objects, including manuscripts, ceramics, metal, glass, ivory, textiles, wood, and precious stones, represents the fruit of a several-year spending spree, in which the Qatari royal family regularly swamped other buyers in Islamic art sales around the world.

The Museums Authority is currently in the conceptual design phase for the Qatar National Museum, which is being designed by Mr. Nouvel, and which will be devoted to what Mr. Mandle described as "the culture, the archeology, the sociology, the geology, and the sealife" of Qatar. Mr. Mandle said that the National Museum will be even bigger than the Museum of Islamic Art, and will be the starting point for visitors to the country.

Mr. Mandle, who was previously the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, arrived in Qatar last month. He described his current job as "the chance of a lifetime" — "to design a range of museums literally from the sand up."

He said he was attracted by the Qatari government's approach. (While the museum project is reportedly the vision of the ruling emir, Mr. Mandle's immediate boss at the Qatar Museums Authority is the emir's daughter, Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani.)

"Rather than importing museums from other parts of the world, they wanted to create their own," he said. "The emir and his family are committed to the idea of an Arab intellectual and cultural renaissance."

He said the job also offers an opportunity to rethink how museums have conventionally been designed. While he refused to divulge many details, he said that Mr. Nouvel's design for the National Museum would offer a unique solution to the problem of context in museums.

"When you go to the Met and see a piece of Islamic art there, you're not seeing a beautiful 18th-century glass mosque lamp in a mosque; you're seeing it in a vitrine in the middle of New York City," he said. With the National Museum, he said, "We're going to find ways, technologically and by making connections [from the museum] to other places in this small country, to recontextualize the visitor experience."

He said that designs would probably be released in the next year, and that the museum would be completed in three to five years.

While the Museums Authority has not officially other museum projects, Mr. Mandle said that plans for a photography museum were "very much alive." In early reports, Santiago Calatrava was slated to design that museum; Mr. Mandle said that he has not yet spoken to Mr. Calatrava.

There is also speculation that Qatar will build a contemporary art museum. The Art Newspaper reported that the royal family bought Damien Hirst's "Sweet Lullaby" for $19.2 million, and that they were probably behind the purchase, for $72.8 million, of the Rothko that David Rockefeller sold at Sotheby's last year. Mr. Mandle said that he could not confirm that the royal family had purchased either of these works.

In March, Mr. de Montebello was one of several prominent New Yorkers who attended a lunch briefing about Mr. Pei's museum, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art. (The president of MoMA, Marie-Josée Kravis, is on the board of the Qatar Museums Authority.) MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, who, unlike either Mr. Mandle or Mr. de Montebello, is actually a scholar of Islamic art, was also there, perhaps contemplating his own opportunities when he fulfills his MoMA contract in 2013.