Anne Eschapasse, a seasoned culture professional with an impressive CV who was formerly Deputy Director of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, has this week taken up a new role as Managing Director for France Muséums in Abu Dhabi. This appears to be a new position within France Muséums, and the appointment seems to reflect a new concern with strategic management of the company.
Ms Eschapasse will be tasked with maintaining the presentation of Louvre Abu Dhabi as “an international museum landmark”, as France Muséums CEO Hervé Barbaret put it. “She will focus on a variety of stakes such as audience engagement, sustainability, accessibility, outreach and capacity building for the Emirati museum and its team. A member of the leadership team, she will embody our commitments and have full authority to act on France Muséums’ behalf.” Whcih sounds pretty comprehensive.
Founded fifteen years ago, France Muséums – aka Agence France-Muséums – is a private company, albeit one that is under the control of the French ministry of culture. In that position it can call on the resources of (and loans from) its founding members, a network of 17 French institutions like the Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and the Musée du quai Branly, which between them hold some of France’s greatest portable cultural treasures.
France Muséums describes itself as a cultural consultancy, saying “we design museums as ecosystems organised around artworks, that are able to interconnect very diverse audiences, cultures and territories … We draw upon our expertise and network to design, produce and implement content, experiences and solutions relevant to each cultural ecosystem and to the ambitions of the professionals who nurture it”.
So far it has just one client, DCT Abu Dhabi, for whom it has handled a number of projects in and around the Louvre. The big one was managing all the operations relating to the Louvre Abu Dhabi collections from 2009 until the museum opened in 2017 – “our engagement included the reception, cataloguing and documentation of the artworks as well as installing them in the exhibition spaces” – and subsequently organising loans from French institutions (“every year we handle over 1,000 movements of artworks, including major masterpieces from French national collections”). Subsidiary projects included some of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s star facilities, among them the Children’s Museum and the ‘interpretation tools’ for the permanent exhibition.
Anne Eschapasse described Louvre Abu Dhabi as “a remarkable museum in many respects”, which sounds like damning with faint praise but presumably lost something in translation. “It is an honour to be in position to accompany it as well as its Emirati and French partners in their pursuit of their ambitions, to strengthen its community connections, especially within Saadiyat Island, and to further its regional and international reach.”
Ms Eschapasse is a seasoned arts and culture professional with over 20 years’ experience gained in the USA, France and Canada. Her new role here probably places as much emphasis on cultural diplomacy and strategic skills as it does on project management and delivery. The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s fifth anniversary is coming up in November, and while relationships seem good with the French partners who provide the meat of the visiting exhibitions – including the current – there are a couple of potentially difficult areas.
Neither seem too problematic, however. One is systemic; five years in seems a reasonable point from which to assess progress. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is undoubtedly a success in terms both of footfall and its presence in the wider museum community; it seems to be doing everything the Abu Dhabi government requires for its soft power strategy and its drive towards high-end cultural tourism; and judging by the content and quality of the loans obtained from France’s premier cultural institutions without too much obvious arm-twisting behind the scenes or bickering about payment, there would seem to be a reasonable relationship with Louvre Abu Dhabi’s French partners.
The other issue might be trickier in the short term, but it shouldn’t affect Ms Eschapasse’s ability to do her job – France Muséums’ involvement in the wide-ranging scandal around antiquities looted from Egypt during the Arab Spring, some of which were subsequently sold to Louvre Abu Dhabi. French curator and archaeologist Jean-François Charnier, the only person so far who has actually been indicted in the case, was working for Agence France-Muséums at the time (though not now). It looks as though individuals rather than organisations are in the frame for this unsavoury affair, though.
Eschapasse began her career as a European decorative arts specialist at Christie’s in New York but then spent five years as Director of Productions and International Relations at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. She moved to Canada in 2009 (she has dual nationality) to become Special Projects Manager at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, followed by a stint as Director of Exhibitions and Education at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and then five years as Deputy Director, Exhibitions & Outreach of the National Gallery of Canada.
So she’s a seasoned designer of exhibitions, implementor of exhibition programmes, manager of external relationships, designer of strategies for national and international outreach, installer and populator of gallery spaces, and producer of several exhibitions for Canada at the Venice Biennale. All that before she joined the Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal in 2021, where she led its architectural expansion project and organisational transformation.
She has organised over a hundred exhibitions in 14 countries, overseen some 30 scholarly publications, and lectured and written on topics related to art history, the art market and exhibition management. On top of that she’s a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République française for her work in cultural diplomacy.
In short – Anne Eschapasse is something of a heavyweight among museum professionals. There’s lots to like about her appointment, not least the evident skills she brings to finding works for exhibitions and a general expertise in the kind of cultural diplomacy that is required in managing so many interests.
As an aside, she has also been involved in POLARIS, an online mentoring programme for developing leadership skills and collegial relationships that is available to museum professionals across the USA. An international version of that would be very welcome here. And while we’re speculating, it’s also not impossible that she’s being groomed for a senior position at Louvre Abu Dhabi itself; after all, the current director Manual Rabaté was formerly CEO of Agence France-Muséums …
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