When Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens on December 11, it will be a landmark in the UAE’s cultural history and the latest chapter in a family legacy that has shaped the art world for nearly a century.
And now the next generation of the Guggenheim family has made a home in Abu Dhabi. Dillon Lawson-Johnston, Solomon R Guggenheim’s great-great-grandson, first visited the city through the museum project his grandfather Peter Lawson-Johnston had championed. Inspired by the city's cultural ambitions, he now lives here with his wife and two children.
“I didn’t want to just be a passive inheritor of a name,” he says. “I wanted to play a very meaningful role in what the Guggenheim name meant in the future.”
Part of Dillon's mission in Abu Dhabi is to tell the family’s story. What struck him when he began looking into that history in his early adulthood was how often a relative had taken a chance on an artist, and how transformative that endorsement became. His great-great-grandfather Solomon was an early collector of Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract paintings. Later, Solomon’s niece Peggy backed Jackson Pollock when he was still working as a museum custodian, paying him enough to paint full-time.
Through his work with the US-based Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, Dillon hopes to help the Abu Dhabi museum reach younger audiences. Part of that, he believes, is giving visitors the chance to get to know his family the way he did.
“I think when you start to learn more about the history of the family and the ambitions and how it all came together, you’re more inclined to go and spend time there and feel like you’re connected and that there’s a certain sense of belonging,” he says.
The agreement to bring the Guggenheim to Abu Dhabi was signed in 2006, the same year Christie’s held its first UAE auction in Dubai.
On Sunday, the auction house held its lively first fine art sale in Abu Dhabi. Bidders spent nearly seven minutes competing for Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s Variations on the Hexagon, which sold for $844,800. The auction brought in $8.94 million, the highest total in more than a decade for a Christie’s evening sale of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art.
Christie’s brought an established London sale to Abu Dhabi for the occasion. Before the auction, chief executive Bonnie Brennan spoke to The National about what that move meant for the future of Christie's and the art world more broadly.
“The market can sustain two centres,” Brennan said. “We can have a moment in London, but we can also have a moment here.”
Collectors and art enthusiasts are in the midst of a landmark season in Abu Dhabi. On November 20, the city’s long-running art fair opens to the public for the first time as Frieze Abu Dhabi, bringing more than 80 galleries to Manarat Al Saadiyat.
This week, Dubai Design Week opens at Dubai Design District, where visitors can see how designers have put traditional crafts to work, from Emirati palm trimming to Japanese woodwork. It runs until November 8.
In Al Ain, you can see one of the first works in the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial on the drive through Al Towayya Roundabout. Roudhah Al Mazrouei’s Tassa takes the form of a traditional Emirati headpiece, scaled up to 80 metres across. The biennial expands to Abu Dhabi on November 15.
With so many firsts for the arts in the UAE this autumn, the most interesting question is what will grow out of them. That’s a story we look forward to telling for years to come.
Painting that Paul Guiragossian refused to leave behind is in Abu Dhabi
During the Lebanese Civil War, whenever Paul Guiragossian’s family had to take shelter, the artist would remove his 1948 self-portrait from the wall above the piano and carry it with him.
His daughter Manuella remembers wondering why, in the rush to get everyone to safety, her father always took that particular painting.
Now the portrait is on view outside Lebanon for the first time. Razmig Bedirian spoke to Manuella about its history and the exhibition she co-curated to mark the centenary of her father’s birth. Paul Guiragossian: 100 Years of Art runs until January 17 at Bassam Freiha Art Foundation, Abu Dhabi.
Find more here.
What makes a happy marriage on The Gilded Age?
The Gilded Age has become one of HBO’s more unlikely hits this decade.
Despite a quiet start that had many debating whether it would even get a second season, the third season found five million viewers tuning in within three days of the finale – nearly twice the audience for the season opener.
Now in its fourth season, which began yesterday on OSN+, Julian Fellowes’s drama has turned to a question that would have been as familiar to couples in 1880s New York as it is today. What makes a happy marriage?
In that bygone world, marriage was a more material prospect. It was easy enough to see what each family stood to gain from a wedding. Whether the two people getting married could make a life together was another question.
Across the show's four seasons, it's shown that even the best relationships require constant work. Carrie Coon, who plays Bertha Russell, has found that part of the show familiar.
Even after years together, she says, one partner can be going through something they barely understand themselves. The other wants to help and has to guess what they need. It’s a challenge she recognises from her own marriage to actor and playwright Tracy Letts.
“My husband is 15 years older than me. There are things he’s dealing with now that I will not be able to relate to until I’m 61,” Coon says.
“We are in some ways really far apart in some spiritual fundamental ways, and yet every single day we still have to figure out how to find each other inside that marriage.”
Find more here.
Dates for your diary
Mo Amer at Etihad Arena, Abu Dhabi – November 6
Ministry of Sound Classical at Dubai Opera – November 7
Abdelkader Secteur at Emirates Theatre, Dubai – November 8
Other highlights
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