More than five centuries ago, the workshops of Mamluk Cairo produced an elaborate wool carpet decorated with three medallions.
Prized across the Mediterranean, such carpets were coveted by Europe's wealthy and powerful, commissioned by popes and exchanged as diplomatic gifts.
The rare carpet, now part of Louvre Abu Dhabi's permanent collection, returned to Europe last year to be displayed at the Louvre in Paris in a major exhibition examining the Mamluk dynasty and its artistic legacy.
The loan may seem like a routine exchange between museums, but it reflects how far Louvre Abu Dhabi has come since opening in 2017, when many of the artworks in its galleries were borrowed from international institutions and collectors.
“We were originally a borrowing institution, but we are moving towards a lending institution as well,” Guilhem Andre tells The National. “Since the opening, we've lent many of our masterpieces abroad.”
Andre, who joined Louvre Abu Dhabi project in 2012 and helped to build its collection and Asian art programme, is now the museum's director of scientific, curatorial and collections management.
As editor of Birth of a Collection, an elegant coffee table book documenting much of the work he has witnessed and helped to oversee, Andre brings together contributions from 42 scholars, curators and historians who examine 240 objects, from ancient artefacts to modern and contemporary artworks. The book is available online and select bookstores in English, Arabic and French.
But the artworks seen at Louvre Abu Dhabi tell only part of the story. Andre recalls how the museum began lending works even before the building opened in 2017, with that activity expanding considerably in recent years.
Since opening, it has lent 42 works to exhibitions in the UAE, the Gulf and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Outgoing loans have more than tripled since 2021, he adds.
Meanwhile, visitors to Louvre Abu Dhabi are also seeing more works that belong to the museum itself. Andre says that when it opened, approximately 30 per cent of the artworks in its permanent galleries came from its own collection. By 2021, owned works outnumbered loans for the first time, with their share reaching 56.8 per cent in 2025.
The collection has expanded from around 600 works at opening to more than 6,000 today, including those held in storage or conservation rather than displayed.
The growth is documented in Birth of a Collection, a successor to Birth of a Museum, published in 2013 to introduce the founding collection and plans for a universal museum in the Arab world. The new book arrives nine years after Louvre Abu Dhabi opened, with a much larger collection to examine and a decade of curatorial work to draw upon.
“The more you move forward, the more you notice that you have gaps, in fact. So that's an unending process, collecting,” Andre says. “Private collector know this as well. But as a museum, of course, we are acting at a very high level, and it's slightly different because we focus on masterpieces at Louvre Abu Dhabi. That's why the book is so important, because it shows the process of collecting.”
Some of those gaps have been addressed through acquisitions of Asian, African and Oceanian art, which Andre says were underrepresented in the museum's earlier holdings. He stresses, however, that the museum's ambitions go beyond expanding its holdings.
“We are not there to unfold in our galleries endless lists and piles of artworks. We are there to feature the cross-cultural relations, to show the artistic production across time during more than 10,000 years of history.”
Among the acquisitions noted in the book is an ornate ivory casket made around 1543 in the Kingdom of Kotte, in what is now Sri Lanka. Decorated with gold, rubies and sapphires, it belongs to a small group of objects sent by the rulers of Kotte to the Portuguese royal court as diplomatic gifts.
Acquired by Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2024, the casket is an example of the interesting stories Andre wants the museum's collection to tell, with galleries bringing together artworks from different civilisations to examine artistic and cultural connections that might otherwise be overlooked.
“Of course, you could think about collecting everything when you see the word universal museum. In fact, it's very different because we have a specific mandate of featuring the diversity, the cross-cultural relationships across time, the encounters,” he says.
“We not only focus on the artworks themselves, but on the relationship between them, because we put them in dialogue. So this is also the immaterial relationship between them.”
Looking ahead, Andre is already imagining what a follow-up to Birth of a Collection might reveal in another decade.
“We have to dream that one day we can present our permanent galleries entirely through our own collection, allowing the museum to achieve full autonomy,” he adds.
“And not only that, but also to lend more of our masterpieces to museums internationally and share our story with audiences abroad.”
