Time Frame: The dizzying heights of culture

With its apparently thick impasto, abstract forms and construction lines clearly visible, Galen Clarke’s aerial shot of Saadiyat Island looks like the stuff of art history – and in many ways it is.

In October 2008, the ground had yet to be broken on the Louvre Abu Dhabi construction site, the capital’s preeminent cultural institution was still the old Cultural Foundation and its annual art event, Art Paris-­Abu Dhabi, was about to be hosted at Emirates Palace for the second year running.

If anybody was at the centre of Abu Dhabi’s nascent international art scene at this time, it was the museum expansionist par excellence, Thomas Krens, the man who commissioned Frank Gehry to design the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which opened in 1997 and provided a model for the Saadiyat Island project.

In 2008, Krens ended his 20-year directorship of the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation in New York to become its senior adviser for international affairs with special responsibility for the development of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Part of Krens’s job was to bring artists such as Jeff Koons, James Turrell and Anselm Kiefer to the capital, where they gave talks to small rooms of culture-starved expatriates. An Artbus service even operated to bring art lovers from Dubai. Part of each artist’s experience was a helicopter tour of Saadiyat, where they would no doubt have been greeted with views that were very similar to the one captured by Clarke.

Seven years later the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is still a thing of the future, but Krens’s involvement is now a thing of the (art historical) past.

* Nick Leech