ABU DHABI—Last Tuesday, May 29, the governments of the United Arab Emirates and France officially launched the “Desert Louvre” project, scheduled for completion in 2013. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed al-Nahayan were in attendance at the ceremony, which took place at the grandiose Emirates Palace Hotel. Under an agreement signed two years ago, Abu Dhabi will pay $555 million over 30 years to the state-run Agence France-Muséums for the use of the Louvre’s name, as well as for special exhibitions, loans, and management direction. Together Sarkozy and the sheik unveiled a preview exhibition called “Talking Art: Louvre Abu Dhabi” at the hotel, which includes 19 new acquisitions in addition to loans from the French national museums, including the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, le Centre Pompidou, the Musée du Quai Branly, and the Musée Guimet.

The ceremony in the grand marble foyer seemed worlds away from the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s construction site on Saadiyat (Happiness) Island, where the temperature just before 9 a.m. had already reached an oppressive 104 degrees and was still rising. In that endless sandy gray landscape, broken only by the shimmering turquoise waters of the Arabian Sea in the distance, the traffic of dump trucks and swirling cranes were the sole signs of life. At the hotel, as if to compensate for the chill of the air-conditioning, waiters carried trays of cappuccinos capped with staggering peaks of foam, while live Arabic music drifted through the room. “This is the first universal museum in this region,” Henri Loyrette, director of the Louvre in Paris, said in his introductory remarks to a room full of international press, especially French, and local dignitaries. “It celebrates the openness of the UAE and the tradition of France.” Loyrette made clear that the Louvre Abu Dhabi would not be a photocopy of French museums but rather an original institution with no cultural boundaries.

Afterward, the crowd flowed into the exhibition space for a tour with Laurence de Cars, the curatorial director of the Agence France-Muséums. “Arabia has always been a crossroads, and all cultures will be present at Louvre Abu Dhabi,” de Cars said. He called Jean Nouvel’s domed roof an “echo of Arabic architectural forms.” That roof will float above the 260,000-square-foot complex of pavilions, plazas, alleyways, and canals, conceived to resemble a city floating on the sea.

A mini-prototype for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the “Talking Art” exhibition jettisons the idea of compartmentalizing artworks according to period and geography, and instead mixes up the pieces to spark “a dialogue.” In one room, a white marble head of Buddha from North China (A.D. 550–577) sits catty-corner to a newly acquired section of the Mamluk Qur’an, from the 14th century, and a Middle European life-size figure of Christ from the 16th century.

If the exhibition makes a powerful statement about the scope of the Louvre’s vision, so do many of the new acquisitions, which include Manet’s The Bohemian (1861–62) and works from the Yves Saint Laurent sale at Christie’s Paris in February, among them Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black by Piet Mondrian (1922), which fetched a record-breaking €21,569,000 ($27,908,129), and Pierre Legrain’s African-style stool from the 1920s, which made €457,000. The new museum has an acquisitions budget of more than $56 million a year. “We are sending strong signals to the world that this acquisitions department is serious. It is a key part of building a national museum,” de Cars said. So too is the development of an Emirati staff.

The Louvre is a linchpin in the Emirate’s plan to transform the desert Saadiyat Island into a major cultural and tourist destination, complete with a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a maritime museum, a performing arts museum, and a national museum, all designed by mega-watt architects. The $27 billion development on the island is also to feature a golf course, hotels, apartment complexes, pavilions, and a lush lagoon district.