Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

Mathaf is housed in a former school building in Education City — Qatar Foundation’s vast campus in the western suburbs, where international universities from Georgetown to UCL maintain branch campuses in buildings that look like architectural competitions. The museum itself is deliberately understated next to its neighbors, a low structure with a shaded colonnade and a building that wants you to think about what is inside rather than what contains it. I went on a Tuesday afternoon in February, expecting to spend an hour, and stayed for three.

The Arab Museum of Modern Art holds around nine thousand works covering Arab and international art from roughly 1840 to the present. The founding collection was assembled over decades by Qatari collector Hussain al-Fardan, who had the foresight or the stubbornness to acquire Arab modernist work at a time when the art world had a very narrow idea of which modernisms mattered. What this means in practice is that the collection preserves a history of artistic experimentation in North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf that is almost entirely absent from major Western museum collections.

I walked through a room of Egyptian abstract expressionists from the 1950s — painters working in Cairo who were in full conversation with what was happening in New York and Paris, translating those formal vocabularies into something that included Islamic geometric traditions and Arab calligraphic line. The paintings were large and confident, and they were made by people whose names I did not know. In the next gallery, Iraqi surrealists. Then Syrian modernists responding to independence. Palestinian artists of the nakba period. Algerian painters working during the French colonial period in a visual language that was trying to say something that the political language couldn’t yet say.

What the museum does, cumulatively, is propose that modernism was not a movement that happened in Europe and America and which the rest of the world gradually caught up with. It was a set of conversations happening simultaneously in many places, and the reason we don’t know the Arab chapter of it is not that it didn’t happen — it is that the institutions that preserve and transmit cultural memory were located elsewhere and looking elsewhere. Mathaf is a corrective. It is also, incidentally, a museum with excellent lighting and well-written wall texts.

I ate at the museum café, a Moroccan-inflected menu with bastilla and harira that was better than museum café food has any right to be, and sat under the colonnade afterward watching the afternoon light change on the campus lawn. Students from the various universities passed, in groups and alone, in every combination of dress and nationality. This too felt like Mathaf’s point: the conversation about what Arab modernity looks like is still ongoing, and the people having it are sitting right outside.

When to go: Year-round — the building is air-conditioned and the collection alone justifies a visit regardless of season. Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays. Allow a minimum of two hours; three is better. The museum runs a rotating program of exhibitions alongside its permanent collection; check the schedule before visiting. The taxi ride from central Doha takes about twenty minutes.