2023-05-10 12:30:41
The Center Pompidou in Paris, one of the most important museums of modern and contemporary art in the world, will close for work at the end of 2025 and will reopen in 2030, announced this Wednesday, May 10 the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak. Only Ircam, (Institute for research and acoustic-music coordination) will continue to operate. Announced in 2021 by the Minister of Culture at the time, Roselyne Bachelot, these modernization and asbestos removal works, which will cost 262 million euros, were initially to extend from 2023 to 2027, the year of the 50th anniversary of the establishment. . Laurent Le Bon, the new president of the Center, had finally obtained a one-year postponement so that it remained open during the Olympic Games. The move and phased closure will begin in the fall of 2024 and will take eighteen months. “A puzzle”, confirmed the minister. Renovation and asbestos removal work on all the facades, fire safety, energy optimization of the building, as well as the necessary arrangements for better accessibility for people with reduced mobility, should begin in early 2026.
Inaugurated in 1977 in the very heart of the capital, the George-Pompidou Center had only undergone a facelift between 1997 and 2000. Today more structural work needs to be carried out, the Center – and its 300 million visitors counted since the opening – being “just worn out”, recalled Rima Abdul Malak. They will allow “ensure survival”insisted the minister, but also “updating its modernity”, when it reopens in 2030, in “a France and an art ecosystem completely different from that of the 1970s”.
The Grand Palais, main setting for continuity
Speaking of the ecosystem, it is precisely on this that the Center Pompidou and its 2,000 agents are counting during the five-year closure to bring its programming to life. And it is the Grand Palais that should serve as the main setting for this continuity. Taking advantage of the happy conjuncture which will see the work on the monument come to an end while those on the Center are looming, and the wavering linked to the departure of Chris Dercon, the former director of the Réunion des musées nationaux for the Cartier Foundation, the Minister jumped at the chance. The President of the Center Pompidou, Laurent Le Bon, thanked him warmly, he who recalled in passing that with his collection of 140,000 works, soon to be increased by a large donation authorized by Antoine de Galbert (the Jean Chatelus collection ), the Center Pompidou was “the largest lender in the world”. At the Grand Palais, Beaubourg should thus be able to continue to offer major monographic or thematic exhibitions on condition that it carves out a place within the already busy program of fairs (including Paris+ by Art Basel) and other privatizations (linked, among other things, to fashion weeks ).
With regard to cultural programming, the main showcase for the contemporary within the Center Pompidou, which we hope will take advantage of this in-depth facelift to also take a facelift in terms of exhibitions (the most contemporary artist scheduled in the months to come being Gilles Aillaud, who died in 2005!), it is difficult for the moment to know what exactly will be his points of departure and the form that his co-programming will take. For the time being, only partnerships with the Palais de Tokyo, on the cinema side, and the Louvre on exchanges calibrated over periods of eighteen months, have been mentioned by President Le Bon. The Centre, a rare institution to be able to articulate a quality multidisciplinary program combining conferences, performances, screenings or hangings, as is currently the case with the ambitious “Moviment” festival chaptered into ten episodes, will it find other interlocutors?
Whatever the case may be, its know-how and its immense collection will be able to count on distribution at two levels: first towards the territories, with “no less than a hundred projects” everywhere in France, promised Laurent Le Bon, from Villeneuve-d’Ascq to Marseille and of course Metz, which has hosted a branch of the Center Pompidou since 2019, or even Massy, in the Paris region, where a future collection center, huge increased storage of a programming location, should open in 2026. The other call for air is of course the international scene with the multiplication of announcements of all-out partnerships with Saudi Arabia, South Korea , China or the United States.
Another expected announcement: the relocation of the BPI (the Public Library of Information), which every day drains thousands of students. It is in the district of Bercy that it will land. A bird’s-eye view of the BNF, but on the other side of the Seine, it will benefit from a space of 10,000 m2 and will accommodate 1,500 reading places. Its little sister, the Kandinsky library, reserved for researchers in art history, should follow, while waiting to recover, when the Center reopens, the current Atelier Brancusi, located on the piazza which will return to the floors of the Center Pompidou. . Access to the BPI should be from the rue Rambuteau side, “north pole more oriented towards research”.
Gigantic underground agora
We come here precisely: the piazza. Tour de force of the architects Rogers and Piano in 1977 when they imposed to leave a huge empty esplanade in front of the Center Pompidou, it is still this which will be at the heart of the redevelopment project of the new generation Center Pompidou. It, or rather its basements since if there is no question, as Laurent Le Bon reminded us, having regard to the issues of the time, “to announce the creation of a building or a new wing but to do with the existing”, the future new Center Pompidou will integrate the large underground car park formerly reserved for buses to create a gigantic underground agora. It must be said that multidisciplinarity and hospitality, in “DNA” of the institution since its inception, as the Minister recalled, is also on the program of the future updated Center Pompidou. “On the same set, we can deploy with the same artist, an exhibition, a performance, a film”.
The rest of the building, completely redesigned, should more or less resume the current organization with the hanging of the collections on the 4th floor and the temporary exhibitions on the 5th and 6th floors. Among the new features: the opening to the public of the terrace on the 7th floor and the creation on the south side of a public access and a restaurant with a terrace facing the Stravinsky Fountain. “This machine continues to make us dream”, concluded the president Laurent Le Bon before quoting the neologism of the poet Francis Ponge, this famous “Moviment”, contraction of monument and movement, well chosen name of the festival presented until the beginning of July in the forum of the Center.
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