bin Talal gives $20 mil for Islamic art wing at Louvre
ABOVE: The Louvre, left, announced yesterday that Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has donated $20 million to fund construction of an Islamic art wing for the already sprawling Paris museum.
Two posts on the Arab world in two days: civilizations might be clashing elsewhere, but here at ADD it’s like one big Benetton ad, all feel-good inclusion and togetherness. They had that kind of day at the Louvre yesterday, as the museum announced a donation of US$20 million from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, to help build a new wing for Islamic art. The Louvre has some 10,000 pieces of Islamic art in its collection but rarely gets to show them, having cluttered up the place with old paintings already.
Bin Talal is one of the richest men in the world, worth an estimated US$21.5 billion. Given that he’s already ponying up almost a third of the total construction cost of the new galleries, it seems like he could probably pull the extra $47 mil from behind his ear if he wanted to, but perhaps that would be a bit ostentatious (ostentation, of course, being totally foreign to the Saudi royal family). Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti are the primary architects, and their design, like the I.M. Pei pyramid, will partly submerge the structure underground, so as not to disturb the facades of the surrounding Cour Visconti, one of the Louvre’s two main courtyards.