Centre Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou is the home of the Musée national d'art moderne, whose collection of more than 140,000 works the institution describes as the richest in Europe and the second-largest in the world. The building, on the Beaubourg plateau of the 4th arrondissement, closed on 22 September 2025 for a five-year renovation and is scheduled to reopen in 2030. The institution has not stopped: its collection is touring partner venues while the building is closed.[1]

The centre was Georges Pompidou's project. In 1969, newly elected president, he decided that Paris should have a cultural centre where painting and sculpture would sit beside music, cinema, books, and audiovisual research. The design went to an international competition, judged in July 1971 by a jury under Jean Prouvé that included Oscar Niemeyer and Philip Johnson. From 681 entries it chose two architects in their thirties, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, working with Gianfranco Franchini and the engineers of Ove Arup & Partners. Pompidou died in office in 1974; the centre opened under his name on 31 January 1977.[2]

The building made the institution famous before the collection could. Piano and Rogers put the structure and services on the outside — blue ducts for air, green for water, yellow for electricity, red for lifts and escalators — and left the floors as open plates that curators could divide at will. Half the site became a sloping piazza, and the main escalator climbs the west façade in a glazed tube.[3]

Four institutions share the building: the Musée national d'art moderne with the Centre de création industrielle; the Bibliothèque publique d'information, a free public library with its own entrance and its own queues; and IRCAM, the music-research institute founded under Pierre Boulez, housed beside the piazza. The mix of museum, library, and music laboratory was Pompidou's founding idea.[1]

The collection crosses these pages at several points. The museum holds a 1964 replica of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, the lost urinal readymade of 1917. The wall of André Breton's studio at 42 rue Fontaine — about 255 objects, from paintings to found stones — entered the collection by dation in 2003 and is displayed as he arranged it. And Constantin Brancusi left his entire studio to the French state on condition that it be reconstructed; the Atelier Brancusi has stood on the piazza, in a pavilion designed by Renzo Piano, since 1997.[1][4]

The exhibition history crosses it too. In December 1979 the centre opened Salvador Dalí: Retrospective 1920–1980 in its Grande Galerie, the show that turned the former Surrealist scandal into a national museum spectacle. A second Dalí retrospective in 2012–13 was among the best attended in the centre's history.

The current closure is the building's second. The first renovation ran from late 1996 to January 2000. The present one is larger: asbestos removal from the façades, corrosion treatment on the steel frame, and accessibility and energy upgrades, with Moreau Kusunoki and Frida Escobedo Studio designing the renewed interior and AIA Life Designers handling the technical work.[1]

Until 2030, the collection travels under the Constellation programme — partner venues in France and abroad, including the Centre Pompidou-Metz — and a new conservation and exhibition hub, the Centre Pompidou francilien in Massy, is scheduled to open in spring 2027. The official site lists current venues and dates.[1]