The deadline is approaching. The Center Pompidou will close this summer for a long period of work. The Parisian liner of modern and contemporary art is not expected to reopen before 2030. A parenthesis of a five-year term, while the museum has just had a prosperous year: 3.2 million visitors in 2024, an increase of 22% over a year, due to the success of the retrospective, in the spring, dedicated to the sculptor Brancusi, and the very documented exhibitions, devoted to the hundred years of surrealism or even to the band drawn.
Asbestos removal
Beaubourg is today, with the Louvre and Orsay, one of the most popular Parisian museums. Its closure will obviously create a big void for tourists and art lovers. Designed by the trio Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, nicknamed “Our Lady of the Pipes”, the building, inaugurated in 1977, must be renovated from top to bottom and asbestos removed. The project, which will cost 262 million euros, was initially scheduled to extend from 2023 to 2027, but was postponed until after the Olympic Games.
The closure of the spaces will be gradual from March to August, then complete in September. Could the museum have avoided this scenario by favoring work in phases? The management of the structure, chaired by Laurent Le Bon, and the Ministry of Culture considered that the dilapidation of the building, which has never been renovated, required this course of massive work.
-During these five years, part of the collections of the museum of modern art will remain visible through the “Constellations” program: several thousand of them will circulate in France and abroad. Particularly at the Grand-Palais, where two galleries, i.e. 2,800 m² in total, will host four exhibitions co-produced with the Pompidou Center each year.
Kick-off on June 6, with a route dedicated to Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Pontus Hultén, until January 2026, and a presentation of the Decharme donation, a panorama of some 300 works of outsider art, until ‘at the end of September.
