Gallery chronicle (March 2009)

Louise Nevelson, Untitled (1968)
Photo by: Bill Jacobson / Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
March 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks” at Pace Wildenstein, New York, February 13–March 14, 2009.

The sculptor Louise Nevelson was the idol of art’s own silent screen, the creator of evocative, cinematic work who also lived like the sirens of early film. An excellent selection of nearly twenty of her large wall sculptures from the 1950s through the 1980s is now on view at Pace Wildenstein in Chelsea.[1]

Nevelson used the syntax of Constructivism to plumb the depths of Romanticism and Symbolism. Hilton Kramer rightly praised her work as a “realm of enchantment.” Now Pace further reminds us how Nevelson refined allusion and mystery to make her own powerful contributions to twentieth-century modernism.

She was born Louise Berliawsky in Kiev, Russia in 1899, the daughter of Jewish parents. At four she moved to the United States and grew up in Rockland, Maine. Her father worked in the timber business; her mother dressed like a Park Avenue grande dame; Louise, meanwhile, developed a persona best suited for her sense of artistic destiny. “I’ve always had to overcompensate for my opinion of myself,” she said. “I had to run like hell to catch up with what I thought of myself.” Her grandiose pronouncements went hand-in-hand with her particular artistic achievement.

“I knew I was a creative person from the first minute I opened my eyes,” she claimed. “I knew it, and they treated me like an artist all of my early life. And I knew I was coming to New York when I was a baby.” She maintained the aura of a successful artist even before she was one. In her life and demeanor she rejected down-and-out bohemianism in favor of celluloid glamor. In 1920 she came to New York and married a shipping magnate named Charles Nevelson. “My husband’s family was terribly refined,” she complained. “Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.” She had a son two years later. In 1931 she divorced, refusing to accept the complications of marriage. “I learned that marriage wasn’t the romance that I sought but a partnership, and I didn’t need a partner.” For many years she managed to live well, but also as an art world outsider. Over time she filled her palazzo-like homes with her large sculptures—first at a Murray Hill townhouse in Manhattan, and later spread through multiple buildings on Spring Street in Soho. She even discarded her home furnishings and other distractions to focus on making art.

She spent a quarter-century in the artistic wilderness. In the early 1930s, she went off to Munich to study with Hans Hofmann. She worked as an extra in films in Berlin and Vienna. She then became an assistant to Diego Rivera, whose sense of scale and technique of storytelling through sequential frames would make a lasting impression on her art. She also developed a lifelong fascination with modern dance and drew from Martha Graham a sensibility for movement: “Dance made me realize that air is a solid through which I pass, not a void in which I exist.”

Nevelson did not emerge onto the public stage until 1958, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired and exhibited Sky Cathedral, a wall-sized object of open wooden boxes containing recovered bits of architectural molding, dowels, and spindles, all painted a uniform black. Sky Cathedral, constructed on a system of box frames she had developed a year before, brought Abstract Expressionist scale and Cubist space into sculptural high relief. It also represented but a fraction of the work lining the walls of her home. Nevelson always exhibited the confidence of someone who was expecting the artistic spotlight. She was fifty-nine years old when it started shining on her.

It wasn’t long before Nevelson became a public eminence in the mode of Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. She wore gypsy bandanas and jockey helmets, sporting inch-long eyelashes and a riot of Incan and Persian jewelry. “I am what you call an atmospheric dresser. When I meet someone, I want people to enjoy something, not just an old hag,” she said. She smoked cigars. She appeared on magazine covers wrapped in furs. She rolled off one-liners and maintained the absolute position of her own artistic greatness. “In Maine, and at the Art Students League in New York, and then in Munich with Hofmann, they all give me 100 plus,” she said, often referring to herself as the builder of an artistic empire. “I am not very modest,” she admitted. She remained prolific up to her death in 1988. In the 1970s and 1980s, particularly after Alexander Calder’s death in 1976, she began receiving numerous commissions for public sculpture.

Most of us, regrettably, now first encounter Nevelson’s work through this public art. She was never at her best sculpting monumental stand-alone objects, nor does her work show well outdoors. “The very basis of Nevelson’s environments is enveloping rather than object-delineated,” wrote Arnold Glimcher. Gather her wooden sculptures in the right room, however, and the experience is altogether different. For the exhibition, Pace Wildenstein smartly displays some of Nevelson’s sculptures on blackened walls. Upon entering the show, I felt like the writer Joe Gillis when he meets Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. “You used to be in pictures. You used to be big,” says Gillis. “I am big,” replies Desmond. “It’s the pictures that got small.”

Nevelson’s own larger-than-life persona would be of little interest were it not so tied to her sculptural practice. Her theatricality helps define her use of form. Hilton Kramer, in his introduction to a 1983 Nevelson catalogue, recalls a studio visit he made to her Murray Hill townhouse in the 1950s: “the most extraordinary of all my encounters with artists and works of art.”

Here one entered a world of shadows, and it required a certain adjustment in one’s vision simply to see even a part of what there was to see… . It was also, as one came afterward to realize, intensely theatrical. Emerging from that house on this first occasion, I felt very much as I had felt as a child emerging from a Saturday-afternoon movie. The feeling of shock and surprise upon discovering that the daylight world was still there, going about its business in the usual way, was similarly acute.

Nevelson arrived at a sculptural form that conveyed the darkness of the movie house by way of Richard Wagner’s “total work of art.” “Theater, dance, music, films—the whole world of theatricality had long been one of Nevelson’s passionate interests,” Kramer remarked. Nevelson never drew formal boundaries between the arts. Everything became absorbed into her sense of overall creativity. Like the movies, which are a vulgar descendant of Wagnerian opera, Nevelson’s dark, musical work has more in common with advanced nineteenth-century art than the distilled classicism of twentieth-century high modernism.

Nevelson’s lush persona seemed far removed from the existential angst of the Abstract Expressionists at mid-century and the chilly serialism of the Minimalists a decade and a half later, even as her career took her through both worlds. In assembling her sculpture from wooden cast-offs, Nevelson became a spiritual actor. Her creative process had as much to do with nineteenth-century occult practices as twentieth-century formal concerns: “I feel that what people call by the word scavenger is really a resurrection. When you do things this way, you’re really bringing them to life. You know that you nursed them and you enhance them, you tap them and you hammer them, and you know you have given them an ultimate life, a spiritual life that surpasses the life they were created for.”

At Pace, the division of staked crates that make up Untitled (1964), turned open on their side, forms the frames of a larger moving image. Taken alone, each box displays an inanimate still life: table legs, pieces of shoes, all perfectly blackened and plunged in a bath of darkness. When read sequentially, though, the box frames become animated. The objects and the black spaces between them start to dance, one box to the next.

Nevelson refined this animating practice in her work in the 1970s, when she ceased relying on found-object crates and began contracting out for more uniform boxes. The result was an orderly constructivist grid, one that reflected the art world’s new measure of Minimalism but without a loss of animated action. For End of Day Nightscape (1973), the best work in the show, Nevelson further divided her grids into smaller and smaller units to arrive at a result so overwhelming it seems to become that total work of art, no longer the product of a single artist. The sculpture can be read differently at multiple distances. From up close it looks like the topography of a city; from farther away, one hears the tones of a contrapuntal fantasia. “The eye is fed such a rich diet that it can never quite take everything in at once,” Kramer remarked in a review of Nevelson’s work in 1976. The divisions have to be “read as a series of sequences, and as we give ourselves over to it, we are enclosed in its magic spell.”

Cascade VII (1979) zooms in on the action, with multiple lines of hinged box doors that open and close as you read down. Cascade VIII (1979) is a perfect open grid of six-by-five boxes where sticks of wood further divide the space and reflect frame to frame. The “Mirror-Shadow” series from the mid-1980s explodes the grid, using it now as open armatures for free-floating objects in suspended space. Here one sees the box-like forms of earlier work mixed in with the allusive stand-alone elements of carved bed frames and musical instruments.

Nevelson’s handful of unpainted assemblages of mixed media from the 1980s at Pace, academic exercises in synthetic Cubist collage, come off as interesting counter-examples to her painted work but in the end fail as experiments in colorization. A few stand-alone sculptures from the same period, which resemble oversized golf bags containing loose strips of wood, also convey little of the evocative authority of her black wall sculptures. Nevelson is best in black and white with wall screens that are halfway between picture windows and stand-alone sculptures. Like much of her outdoor sculpture, the failed works at Pace risked variations that became too object-specific.

Louise Nevelson should be remembered for her artistic tenacity in lean times as well as her prolific output in flush. She understood the world in cinematic form, one that spoke in the silent stop-action of a flickering screen. “I feel in love with black; it contained all color,” Nevelson remarked in her best Norma Desmond imitation. “It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Black is the most aristocratic color of all, the only aristocratic color. For me this is the ultimate. You can be quiet, and it contains the whole thing.” Fortunately for us, late in life, Nevelson was able to see herself become the star of her own spectacular in black and white.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks” opened at Pace Wildenstein, New York, on February 13 and remains on view through March 14, 2009. Go back to the text.

Gallery chronicle (February 2009)

 

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Philip Guston: 1954–1958” at L&M Arts, “John Walker: Drawings 1973–1975” at Knoedler & Company, and “Biala: Collages 1957–1963” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

 

Conventional wisdom has it that the work of Philip Guston started out very pretty and ended up very ugly. The place in history of this painter—born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada in 1913 and raised in Los Angeles—has been confirmed, or at least defined, by his movement from one style to another. His embrace of gritty, cartoony neo-expressionism in the 1970s (full of boot heels and white-hooded Ku Klux Klan figures) elevated the abstract-expressionist confections he painted in the 1950s.

Within this dynamic, the actual paintings from either period mean less individually than they do in their relationship to one another and in the mythology behind them. “They have had a cultish influence almost akin to that Cézanne had on young painters a century ago, influence here being partly a measure of the permission one artist gives to another, through example, to be free,” gushed the chief art critic for The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, in his consideration of late Guston in 2003.

By comparison, an earlier chief critic for the Times had an altogether different take. In a 1970 review titled “Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum,” Hilton Kramer slammed Guston’s Marlborough Gallery metamorphosis as a career move by an artist who has “always been a latecomer,” one who, in the 1950s, had embraced the “aesthetics of the New York School when it was already well established.” Kramer called Guston’s late paintings “a form of artifice that deceives no one—except, possibly, the artist who is so out-of-touch with contemporary realities that he still harbors the illusion his ‘act’ will not be recognized as such.”

Kramer was right about all but the public’s reaction to Guston. The art world not only came to embrace the artist’s reinvention but also found itself energized by Kramer’s critique. The politics of the late 1960s, Guston explained, encouraged him to reject “all that purity” of his earlier abstract work. Today the popularity of his “risky” career move has only intensified. In a 2004 sale of a 1975 Guston painting, which realized a hammer price of $1.2 million, Christie’s auction house included a quotation from Kramer’s negative 1970 review as a selling point for the lot.

For the accepted Guston storyline to work, however—for the late paintings to be considered appropriately impure—the early paintings must exhibit enough “purity” of abstract form for Guston to reject later on. This month L&M Arts offers up a chance to test this premise with a selection of seven large Guston paintings from the “pure” abstract years of 1954 to 1958.[1] Much of the material is well known. Two of the paintings come through major museum loans: Painting (1954) from the Museum of Modern Art and Dial (1956) from the Whitney Museum. The remaining five consist of work from private collections. One painting on view, Beggar’s Joys (1954– 1955), is today recognized mainly for realizing a Guston auction record of over $10 million at a Sotheby’s sale in 2008. (The Sotheby’s auction catalogue again praised Guston for going “beyond the attempts of outside observers to judge and define his work, but to subvert his own previous aesthetic assumptions as he evolved stylistically.”)

To my eyes, early and late Guston look best when considered side by side in those postage-stamp-sized reproductions you find in textbook surveys of modern art. In person, the early works seem far less pretty than the artist’s later ugliness would lead you to believe. At L&M, MOMA’s Painting is built on a brittle structure of hatch marks with a dominant red that is more scablike than lustrous. The Whitney’s Dial strikes me as a smudgy floral still life. I enjoyed the circus riot of To Fellini (1958)—upon seeing it, I couldn’t help humming Nino Rota’s theme from 8 1/2. But I found the ironically named Beggar’s Joys, all $10 million of it, more cloying than pretty, more a piece of deliberate ornamentation than a great work of art.

I don’t much care for Guston’s color sense—he carried the same pinks and reds right on over from early to late. His ultimate transformation seems not so much to be a move from pure to impure but from fuzzy to focused. The last work in the show, Traveller III (1959–60), outside of the exhibition’s 1954–1958 purview, already reveals the beginning of this transition, as a gray form comes forward into sharper relief. The high abstract works at L&M are mannered studies in obscurity: we are expected to look past the murk for the objects buried beneath. Guston’s later, cartoonish figures speak to a low-rent private iconography—here we must tune our tinfoil antennas to the evils of society. Both styles operate through assumptions about what exists beyond the painting rather than what is contained within it. This is a strategy that Guston relied on consistently throughout his career.

There is reason to be particularly interested in the abstract painters who came of age in New York in the 1970s. Many of them have been producing excellent work for the past four decades. The British-born painter John Walker, who arrived in New York on a Harkness Fellowship in 1969, is one example. An illuminating exhibition of his drawings from 1973–1975 is now on view at Knoedler—the gallery’s fifteenth Walker show in the past twenty-five years.[2]

Many of the painters of Walker’s generation have yet to receive their full due. From Jake Berthot to Thornton Willis, the list goes on, and Walker himself is no exception. At a time when theory and criticism focused on the hard-edged, pre-meditated practices of minimalism and conceptualism, as well as the new figuration of pop art, neo-expressionism, and photo-realism, the abstract painters who are sometimes known as the “post-minimalists” or the “third-generation abstract expressionists” stood apart from the mainline of art history by continuing to develop and reaffirm the studio practices initiated by the New York School.

Walker and his generation embraced the same aspects of chance and experimentation that had produced the great abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s. They also adopted certain minimalist motifs, adding serialism and programmatic application to their studio repertoire. In this period, the stand-alone, all-over abstractions of an earlier era tended to give way to a sectioning-off of the picture plane—with divisions working off one another—and groups of paintings in formal dialogue. Grids made a recurring appearance. Paintings developed through trial and error, feeding off the dynamics of previous examples. New work added to, undercut, and challenged prior progress. Nothing was allowed to get too complete.

The abstract painters of Walker’s age may have shared superficial affinities with the minimalists, but their overall approach to art could not have been more different. For the minimalists, it was all about beginnings and ends. For the abstract painters of the 1970s, process was everything. Many of them, now in their sixties and seventies, have arrived at an age when they are doing great mature work. With a studio practice designed to build on itself, they have followed a slow-growth evolutionary process and have now arrived at a masterly sense of painting’s possibilities.

In fall 2006, Knoedler exhibited a new body of small, near-abstract landscapes by Walker called “Seal Point Series,” painted on a deck of antique Bingo cards. Writing about this exhibition two years ago, I considered it a Bingo moment for the artist. Those found objects, featuring that famous pre-printed Bingo grid, encouraged Walker to examine a single landscape view through serial exploration.

The current Knoedler show takes us back forty years from this recent highlight to a moment when the artist was at the peak of his early development. In the mid-1970s Walker had just completed a series of massive collages, signature early works that were monumental in scale. After a time, they must have also seemed resistant to further development. So Walker began to push against them. He embraced intimate scale and the lightness of ink washes and Japanese rice paper. He also developed deliberately evanescent artistic practices, creating a series of “blackboard drawings” that was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974—all meant to end in a cloud of chalk dust. “It was as if Walker had re-thought the question ‘What is a picture?’ and decided to explore it from a point of view antithetical to the one he had taken hitherto,” admired the critic John Russell, writing in Art News in 1973.

From the start, Walker has been prolific enough to drive the engine of his own development. “Looking around at his contemporaries, he finds no echo, no unit of measurement, no recent track record against which to compete,” noted John Russell, and so “Walker has always worked his pictures in ways peculiar to himself. The images were his own; but so, equally, was the process.”

Most of the drawings now at Knoedler have not been seen for decades. They represent a few different fertile lines of development, all remarkably examined and executed within the same three-year period. The gallery’s front room is dedicated to works on paper related to Walker’s blackboard series. Fortunately for us, these drawings are not designed to be erased at the end of the show. For the darker works from 1973 and 1975 (all the drawings in the show are untitled), Walker dug something like an etching needle into a black acrylic-covered ground. He carved out a handful of basic forms, reflecting the work he had done in collage, and squiggled them in with a loose hatching of lines. He then went over the black surface of the paper with dry white pigment, filling in the roughed-out edges and leaving a spongy white wash on the paper’s black surface that can resemble photo emulsion or the wiped-down blackboard in your old grammar-school homeroom.

I love the effect Walker achieved in these works. Taken another way, the white dust glowing out of these black sheets resembles the stars in a nighttime sky, with the etched lines calling to mind the constellations. In other work, Walker reduced the all-over blackness of the picture plane to a taped-out section of white paper, which he covered with black oil stick before carving it up and rubbing in chalk dust. The effect is altogether different. I nearly mistook it for an act of print-making. All told, these blackboard drawings are more enigmatic and resonant than what you might find by Cy Twombly from a similar period, working his more famous Latin-class hijinks.

The gallery’s side room features an extensive series of ink and pencil washes on Japanese paper from 1974. I could swear they depicted the identical view of the Maine coast found in Walker’s Bingo series thirty years later. The gallery director Frank Del Deo assures me that was impossible (I would still like to see Walker’s 1974 phone records). The sand, the sea, the reflecting sun, the mountain on the horizon—even if Walker was working here only from abstract forms, taking off from the earlier collages, you quickly recognize the continuity of his spatial divisions.

In the large back room, Knoedler has assembled a series of 1975 Walker drawings in charcoal that recall the moody work of Georges Seurat (I am told that MOMA’s recent Seurat exhibition was one inspiration for this show). The best drawings are the messy ones, where Walker has allowed his pigments to rub up and smudge the white borders around his images. Here the studio process comes to the fore. We can see the evidence of the artist at work, although in my opinion at times more successfully than at others. Several of Walker’s charcoal drawings seem too concerned with gradations of tone, too enamored with the charcoal catching the texture of the paper. More impressive are his similar 1973 drawings in oil crayon, again dominated by a heart of black, and here taking up even smaller spaces on larger sheets of white paper. This is Walker at his most enigmatic—working through the darkness back into the light.

The artist known merely as Biala was born Janice Biala in Poland around 1903 and died in France in 2000. She spent most of her time shuttling between New York and Paris, living with the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, becoming friends with Willem de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg, and getting to know over her long life just about everyone along art’s migratory patterns. She exhibited her own paintings regularly on two continents—sweet, joyful work dipped in Pernod that can leave you tipsy.

I usually take my Biala in moderation, but this month Tibor de Nagy gives us an excuse to indulge with an exhibition of her collages from the late 1950s and early 1960s.[3]

They say it’s the sugar that does you in, and here Biala has cut the sweetness with the rough edges of mixed media. Pieces of newsprint, torn construction paper, pencil sketches, and spatters of paint add a degree of toughness to her work. The process encouraged this artist, accustomed to getting by on sensuality alone, to take on a new sense of rigor. The results are superb.

Provincetown (1957), her best work in the show, is a museum-quality streetscape built of painted surfaces and paneled planes—Matisse in Morocco by way of Cape Cod. Untitled (Château de Talcy) (c. 1961) is a dynamic mass of color chips and bits of spiral-bound paper that is a swirling dynamo—an enigmatic abstract image that works though feeling more than representational content. Untitled (Blue Tree), the work at the entrance to the gallery, is Biala at the top of her form, with collage and brushy spatters of paint exploding with nearly anthropomorphic vigor. Table Chargée, a large work from 1963, is so rugged that up close it’s nearly impossible to see past the shapes on the picture plane. Step back, however, and a complete still life of table and chair, teapot and spoons come into focus—a wonderful effect.

“In each of the collages,” writes Mario Naves in his catalogue essay, “we experience the heady excitement of an artist tussling with process, precedent and the unexpected poetry of the everyday.” Process, precedent, and poetry—Biala is an artist who understood there’s a place for all three.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Philip Guston: 1954–1958” opened at L&M Arts, New York, on January 15 and remains on view through February 28, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “John Walker: Drawings 1973–1975” opened at Knoedler & Company, New York, on January 15 and remains on view through March 7, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Biala: Collages 1957–1963” opened at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, on January 17 and remains on view through February 28, 2009. Go back to the text.

Culture Gulf

ART & ANTIQUES
February 2009

Culture Gulf
by James Panero

With his Museum of Islamic Art, the Emir of Qatar makes a bold bid to transform the desert nation into a world art center....

It was an evening out of the Arabian Nights, with the air of the Gulf hanging thick over a campsite of tents and divans. The entire art world, it seemed, had been flown in as the personal guests of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, on Nov. 22, to celebrate the opening of his new Museum of Islamic Art. There was Sheikh Hamad, the supreme monarch of the gas-rich country, sitting with his family by the upper entrance of his new museum. His guests marveled at the spectacle from the tents below, mingling in black-tie attire with local grandees dressed in white dishdashas, waiting for the doors to open to the Emir’s new museum. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed with his Silk Road ensemble from a small outdoor stage. Jeff Koons admired the pillars of flowers dotting the landscape. Damien Hirst posed for snapshots with tongue literally in cheek. Ron Wood, the Rolling Stone, made his way over a rug-covered boardwalk. "I’m knackered," he said to White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling. Wood had missed his flight to Dubai for a party the previous night.

An array of fireworks went up around the new museum. Starbursts illuminated the water. Golden tracery mirrored the fronds of the corniche, the bay at the center of Qatar’s capital city of Doha, in which the Museum of Islamic Art now stands. "It is like the beginning of the world and the end of the world," remarked James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum. "The fireworks are from another aesthetic." Speaking of his own situation as an honored guest in a Gulf state, Snyder noted, "One needs to interpret this invitation as an important development."

Many of the Emir’s assembled group of museum curators and art stars pondered the significance of the event in which they were participating. With an opening party that appeared untouched by economic concerns, the Emir was making a significant overture to world culture with the unveiling of his new museum, a Western-style institution housed in a faceted gem of a building designed by I. M. Pei.

"I think it is spectacular," said Stephen Lash, chairman of Christie’s Americas. "This is a new development in a new region. We are staring at an important part of the future." Thomas Campbell, the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said, "We’re extremely supportive of what is going on here." He was heading up a contingent that included outgoing director Philippe de Montebello and president Emily Rafferty. "The kind of money they’re spending, we can’t compete with that."

Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, said, "The critical issue is that finally an Islamic nation has recognized the significance of their own culture in a major way and felt the importance of making that culture alive and valid to the entire region and beyond. They are sending a message how Islamic art could help reduce tension and go back to the fundamentals of beauty and harmony and order. This is the new world in the cradle of civilization. It is the ancient world reborn."

A hundred years ago, the oil barons of the United States converted their petrodollars into world-class art collections and the museums to house them. Today it is the energy-rich states lining the Persian Gulf (here known as the Arabian Gulf or simply "the Gulf") that are competing to do the same. The story of Qatar’s cultural ambitions begins in 1995, when Sheikh Hamad, then in his early 40s, deposed his father, who was vacationing in Switzerland, in a bloodless coup. Sheikh Khalifa had ruled Qatar since a year after its independence from Britain in 1971, but he had been slow to invest the country’s petroleum revenue in cultural improvement. Doha, now a vast construction site, continues to show signs of poor urban planning and cheap cement construction from its initial development in the 1970s.Upon his ascension, Sheikh Hamad ushered in a series of political and cultural reforms—religious tolerance, private foreign ownership, women’s suffrage, the creation of the news channel Al Jazeera—turning his conservative Islamic country into a new model for the Middle East. At the same time, the Emir invested in the technology to explore and tap the vast gas reserves beneath Qatar’s territorial waters known as the North Field, converting this one-time hamlet of pearl divers and nomadic tribesmen into the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.

An upturn in world energy prices, combined with steady oil production and increased gas exploration, has created unprecedented wealth for this small country, which is the size of Connecticut and boasts one of the world’s highest GDPs.

The same oil money that helped pay for a new skyscraper skyline rising out of the corniche has led to the creation of Qatar’s 4,500-object collection of Islamic art, with artifacts ranging over 1,400 years, from Spain to the Far East—the results of a decade-long buying spree. Backed by a blank check from the Emir, Qatar has been an unstoppable force as Islamic work came up at auction, but due to the relatively short acquisition period, the collection has been limited by the public availability of important work. Even after the Al-Thani family paid £2.9 million for the Clive of India flask in 2003, for example, it took nearly five years to negotiate its export from Britain to Qatar.

Eight years ago, after an initial architectural competition fell through, the Emir convinced Pei to take on the project to house his collection. "I started this project with the Emir," said Pei, 91, as he toured the new museum. "He asked me to do a building of this kind for Qatar to put an emphasis on culture. Here, in the oil-and-gas world, culture is not emphasized as it should be. I accepted it because of that challenge. I’ve never had the opportunity to do anything like this."

Pei researched Islamic architecture, eventually rejecting the opulence one finds in Cordoba, Spain, for the simple massing of a 13th-century ablution fountain, which he admired in the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo. Pei filtered the stepped proportions of this domed building through his modernist sensibility to create a refined structure that is a near-perfect architectural pairing of ancient and modern. It is more conservative in materials and form than other recent museum projects around the world, but its restrained opulence mirrors the elegant treasures contained within.

Project costs, like much in Qatar, remain a court secret, but no expense was spared in the museum’s construction. Pei rejected the museum’s initial proposed location and insisted his project be set off from the encroaching city on a 64-acre park of landfill extending out in the Gulf. "I didn’t choose it. I made it!" he declared of the site. The same limestone that Pei used in his addition to the Louvre was quarried and imported from Burgundy, France. Black jet mist stone was brought in from Virginia for the museum’s granite base, which extends down to the water line. Due to the desert heat, which can reach 130 degrees in the summer, much of the construction took place at night, with ice poured into the cement mix to prevent the museum’s molded coffered ceiling from cracking as it dried.

To lead Qatar’s growing cultural concerns—the Museum of Islamic Art is the first of the Emir’s many museum projects to be completed—the country drew on American and British expertise. Marie-Josée Kravis, the president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art, joined the Qatar Museums Authority board two years ago and helped secure a launch event at MoMA. "Islamic experts tell me that in quality it compares to the great collections of the world," she said. A year ago Roger Mandle, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, became executive director of the QMA. "We are able to build these museums afresh, from the ground up," he said, explaining the appeal of his new appointment. "We hope to create a new paradigm for museums in the 21st century." Last summer, Oliver Watson, a one-time curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, left his post as keeper of Eastern art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to become the director of the Museum of Islamic Art. "It is an educational thing for the world," he said on opening day. "It’s not Bedouins and oil and terrorism. It’s about one of the great cultures of the world in its time. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true—if, as I hope is the case, America realizes that the Middle East is important."Behind these high-profile appointments is the leader of the ruling Al-Thani family, Emir Sheikh Hamad, and behind him a duo of powerful women: the second of his three wives, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned, and their daughter Al-Mayassa. The opening of the museum became a coming-out party, of sorts, for the elegant 25-year-old Sheikha, the new public face of the Al-Thani clan, a Duke University alumna who is now taking graduate classes at Columbia. "We are truly becoming a global capital of culture," she proclaimed from the museum steps. A day later she held a surprise press conference on the museum balcony with the actor Robert De Niro to announce the creation of a Doha branch of the Tribeca Film Festival.

The cultural establishment has been wary of the Al-Thanis’ buying power. A year and a half ago, there was a small uproar over their reported $72.8 million purchase of a Mark Rothko consigned to Sotheby’s by David Rockefeller; critics gasped at the price and objected to a foreign buyer snatching up an important modernist work. The Al-Thani family’s acquisition of a multimillion-dollar Damien Hirst sculpture spoke little of artistic leadership or sound cultural investment. Then there was the scandal of Sheikh Saud Al-Thani, the Emir’s high-profile cousin and one-time principal art buyer, who was stripped of his purchasing authority in 2005 and placed under arrest for the misuse of Qatari funds.

Against this backdrop the new Museum of Islamic Art stands out as a remarkable achievement. The redevelopment of Qatar might lag half a decade behind its Gulf neighbors in the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the two most powerful principalities in the UAE, already boast glistening new cities and thriving cultural scenes. There are art fairs such as Art Paris Abu Dhabi and Art Dubai (where this year the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, worth $1 million, will be handed out), and galleries such as Dubai’s Third Line, which recently opened an outlet in Doha. The emirate of Sharjah is making its mark with the Sharjah Biennial, which coincides with Art Dubai this March. And for the past three years, Abu Dhabi has been making headlines with its monumental proposal for the development of Saadiyat Island, which is to include a Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry and a branch of the Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel (the Louvre’s naming rights alone are reported to have cost $500 million).

The opening of the Museum of Islamic Art might be a minor event compared to the plans for Saadiyat Island, but Qatar has distinguished itself by founding a museum that, in Mandle’s words, is "not about glitz, how big it is, how much it costs, but how good it is." As an independent institution, the museum resists the allure of Culture Inc. that one sees in the franchised development of Saadiyat. It also contrasts with Qatar’s own "Education City," with branch campuses of six American universities, including Georgetown, Cornell and Texas A&M, which come off as dislocated outposts of imported culture—replete with banners of football players and "Welcome Home Aggies"—rising out the desert sands. After initial talks, Yale balked at opening a branch campus of its own in Qatar, over the requirement that it award undergraduate diplomas indistinguishable from the ones handed out in New Haven.

With a notable collection that is set to grow, a contextualized architectural landmark and a seasoned staff to study, conserve and display the art inside, Qatar has raised the bar of its cultural ambitions. For the emirate’s contentious Middle Eastern neighbors—Qatar’s precious gas claim abuts Iran’s—the museum speaks to the beauty of a shared civilization. For the West it communicates a view of the Islamic world that looks past the latest terrible headlines.

So as the doors opened, the guests—an assembly of cultural luminaries, imported like much else in Qatar from New York, Paris and London—made their way inside. Hirst was full of praise for his collector’s new museum. "Brilliant. I’m so busy looking at the building I can’t focus on the art," he remarked in a room of brass astrolabes, the astronomical computers of Islamic science. "This is where it all comes from, the past." De Montebello, meanwhile, absorbed his surroundings with more reserve. "Floor-to-ceiling vitrines—if you can afford them," he remarked, overlooking a room of glazed earthenware from ninth-century Iraq and a jade pendant made for the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal.

With the opening of its Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar has made a serious play in the art world. Now it remains to be seen whether the country can operate an institution up to international standards. Its intentions are good and its buying power is unrivaled, but Qatar has yet to convince the West of its full ability to run a serious museum. In a world where money is no object, the approbation of the museum establishment is one commodity that still needs to be earned.