Centre Georges Pompidou

The centre began as an argument about things Paris did not have. André Malraux, France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs, had pressed for the decentralisation of art and culture driven by political power, and in the 1960s city planners resolved to move the food markets of Les Halles — historically significant structures long prized by Parisians — with the idea that cultural institutions might occupy the cleared market ground. The city also had no large free public library at that date. The debate began over Les Halles itself; once the controversy settled, President Charles de Gaulle announced in 1968 that the library would go on the Plateau Beaubourg.

In 1969 the newly elected president, Georges Pompidou, decided to build a new museum of modern art and picked the Plateau Beaubourg, the only site available after the demolition of the îlot insalubre no 1. Because that ground was also the only plot able to take the large public library, it was decided in February 1970 to bring the two together in a single cultural establishment, the library drawing in visitors who would then find the rest. "I would passionately like Paris to have a cultural centre," Pompidou explained, "which would be at once a museum and a centre of creation, where the plastic arts would sit beside music, cinema, books and audiovisual research. The museum can only be of modern art, since we have the Louvre." The decision to build a monumental ensemble devoted to contemporary art on the plateau was taken formally at a restricted council on 11 December 1969, on a programme document drafted by Sébastien Loste, then a chargé de mission at the presidency; the Conseil de Paris gave its agreement on 23 December.

The original brief covered the museum, the Bibliothèque publique d'information and the Centre de création industrielle founded by François Mathey, chief curator of the Musée des Arts décoratifs. In 1971, at Pompidou's direct prompting, a centre for musical creation was added under Pierre Boulez, who agreed to return to France, where he had ceased all activity since 1966; it became IRCAM. The administration received the whole thing badly. It yoked a museum answering to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs to a library then answering to the Ministry of National Education, and to a third body that declared itself independent of — and a rival to — the directorate of music, whose head, the composer Marcel Landowski, appointed by Malraux, was in open war with Boulez. Its founders meant it as an answer to a run of failures in French cultural policy: no modern-art museum worth the name, public reading lagging northern Europe, and contemporary music held in official disdain.

On 26 August 1970 Robert Bordaz, a conseiller d'État, was appointed in the Council of Ministers as delegate for the realisation of the centre on the Plateau Beaubourg. He gathered a team of about ten to prepare the international architecture competition launched in December 1970. Pompidou had asked that the competition carry as few constraints as possible, height limits included, and that it be open to any architect of talent, "were he young and without financial means" — an entrant whose scheme was noticed was to be paid for his work and costs. It was the first time in France that international architects were allowed to take part. From 681 projects the jury, which included Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Prouvé and Philip Johnson, chose the scheme of Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini in 1971. Among the beaten entries was André Bruyère's egg-shaped building of 38 storeys and 80,000 square metres, which would have broken sharply with the straight lines of the Paris streets. Rogers and Piano, emerging architects in their thirties, had turned the structure, mechanical systems and circulation onto the outside of the building in the belief that they had no chance of winning the commission. At the press conference announcing the result, the contrast between the sharply dressed Pompidou and the "hairy young crew" of architects was read as a "grand bargain between radical architecture and establishment politics".

The architects were joined by the engineers Ove Arup & Partners under Peter Rice, the principal engineer, responsible among other things for the Gerberette; Edmund Happold also worked on the scheme. They set up next door to Bordaz's mission and, in 1973, inside it. In January 1972 Bordaz became president of the établissement public du centre Beaubourg, the body charged with building the place, and from 1971 he assembled the future heads of its activities into a "users' council" that became the centre's board of management once the building was finished. Pontus Hultén, a Swede who arrived in France in September 1973, was appointed director of the Musée national d'Art moderne on a three-year contract and told, with his deputy Germain Viatte, to conceive the new museum on resolutely contemporary and international lines. Jean-Pierre Seguin, first director of the Bibliothèque publique d'information, had been working on that project since 1967. Mathey took the Centre de création industrielle, which he had created in 1968 within the Union centrale des arts décoratifs and where it had languished for want of means. On 20 March 1973 the Council of Ministers fixed the building programme and the money for it, spread over several years and paid as exceptional grants outside the ordinary credits of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Roger Frangi (1922–1992), a chief engineer at GTM, organised the site and coordinated the trades.

Building took the streets that had been there. The rues des Étuves-Saint-Martin, de la Corroierie, Neuve-Saint-Médéric, Simon-le-Franc — including the old rue Maubuée — and Brisemiche, including the old rue du Poirier, disappeared wholly or in part, and the wider modernisation of the Beaubourg quarter also erased the rue Brantôme, the rue de la Cour-du-Mort and the cul-de-sac Bertaud. The institution's statute was settled by the law of 3 January 1975 creating the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou. In the meantime Prime Minister Jacques Chirac had had to fight hard against the new president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who was considering stopping the project outright; at Chirac's request a restricted council held in August 1974 decided that the works would go on. The bill for the building came to 993 million francs. GTM completed it in 1977.

On 31 January 1977 the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou was inaugurated by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the presence of Prime Minister Raymond Barre, Mme Claude Pompidou and a crowd of public figures. It opened to the public on 2 February. It held three institutions: the Bibliothèque publique d'information, open to all comers but lending nothing; the Musée national d'Art moderne, the largest museum of modern and contemporary art in Europe, whose collection stood at 113,675 works by six thousand artists on 1 January 2019; and IRCAM, in its own building across the Place Stravinsky.

The centre was planned for a fraction of the crowds it drew — five thousand visitors a day by one reckoning of the brief and eight thousand by another — and took five times the number first predicted. By the mid-1980s it was becoming a victim of that popularity, of the sheer number of its activities and of a complicated administrative structure. Dominique Bozo returned in 1981 as director of the Musée national d'Art moderne and rehung it, bringing out the full range of the collections and the major acquisitions made since the opening. In 1992 the Centre de création industrielle was absorbed into the museum, thereafter MNAM/CCI; the CCI ceased to exist as an organisation with its own design programme, while the museum began building a design and architecture collection alongside its modern and contemporary art. In its first two decades the centre attracted more than 145 million visitors.

The architecture drew a loud quarrel: pipework, escalators and metal walkways, everything a building traditionally hides, were here put on open display. Paris nicknamed it "Notre-Dame de la Tuyauterie" and "le Pompidolium", and jeered at an art shed, a gasworks, an oil refinery, a cultural jumble-sale, an avant-garde wart. Le Figaro declared that "Paris has its own monster, just like the one in Loch Ness". Critics attacked the expense of a building that swallowed 120 million francs in the year it opened, a seventh of the culture budget. Piano said he had wanted to demolish the image of a cultural building that frightens people, and described the design as "not a building but a town where you find everything – lunch, great art, a library, great music". National Geographic later called the reaction "love at second sight". Reporting Rogers's Pritzker Prize in 2007, The New York Times wrote that the design had "turned the architecture world upside down", and the Pritzker jury said the Pompidou had "revolutionised museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city".

Until 1997 a millennium clock called the Génitron counted down the seconds to the year 2000. At the end of that year, its twentieth anniversary marked, the centre closed for a deep renovation led by Renzo Piano: twenty-seven months of work costing close to 576 million francs, 88 million euros, of which the State found 482 million. The scheme added 8,000 square metres to the total floor area and reconfigured surfaces and volumes. While the doors were shut the centre took itself to the provinces with 34 exhibitions "hors les murs", which drew more than 2,500,000 visitors. It reopened on 1 January 2000 and took 80,000 visitors over the first weekend, into larger rooms, a new arrangement of the galleries, improved accessibility and a new children's gallery mounting two exhibitions a year. Until those works, a fifth of the centre's eight million annual visitors — predominantly foreign tourists — had ridden the outside escalators up to the panorama platform without going into the collections.

Attendance held. Between 1977 and 2006 the centre counted 180 million visitors, after which the global figure ceased to be taken at the main entrance and only the museum and the library were counted. The museum rose from 3.1 million visitors in 2010 to 3.6 million in 2011 and 3.75 million in 2013; the 2013 Dalí retrospective broke the daily record at 7,364 people a day and 790,000 in all. Visitors totalled more than 5,209,678 in 2013. In 2017 the museum had 3.37 million and the library 1.37 million. In 2019 the centre received 3,273,867 visitors, an average of 10,595 for each day it opened, and employed around a thousand full-time equivalents on a budget of 119.7 million euros. It took 3.1 million in 2022, well up on 2021 but below 2019, after the closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in France.

On 26 January 2021 the culture minister Roselyne Bachelot announced a major restoration for 2023 to 2027. On 10 May 2023 her successor Rima Abdul Malak announced instead a closure running from 2025 to 2030, the work having become unavoidable through the corrosion and wear affecting a building whose structure and services hang outside it. The budget for 'Action Centre Pompidou 2030' was put at 262 million euros, covering the total removal of asbestos, technical and energy standards, safety and accessibility for disabled visitors. In 2024 Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki of Moreau Kusunoki, working with the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, were selected to remodel most of the establishment for 186 million euros funded by the centre, partly through a patronage campaign, in a competition whose jury included Piano himself. Preparatory closures began early in 2025; the Bibliothèque publique d'information moved to its Lumière building at 40 avenue des Terroirs de France on 25 August 2025, and on 22 September 2025 the centre announced its full shutdown, with reopening expected in 2030.

In 1999 the heirs of Alphonse Kann requested the return of Georges Braque's The Guitar Player, which the centre had acquired from Heinz Berggruen in 1981. In 2011 the centre admitted that it held three paintings by Fédor Löwenstein — Les Peupliers, Arbres and Composition — that had been looted during the Nazi occupation of France. In 2021, after the French government restituted a looted Max Pechstein painting to the heirs of Hugo Simon, the centre held an exhibition in tribute to Simon, a persecuted art collector.

The law of 3 January 1975 made the centre a national public establishment of a cultural character, charged with encouraging the creation of works of art and of the mind and with running a cultural ensemble covering the plastic arts, acoustic and musical research, industrial design, cinema and public reading. It is state-owned and subsidised by the Ministry of Culture, which appoints its directors and supervises a management that remains independent; the subsidy covered 64.2 per cent of the budget in 2012, 82.8 million euros of 129 million, essentially for staff. Of the 119.7 million euros of 2019, 78.5 million came from the State and 41.2 million from the centre's own receipts. Its president is appointed for five years in the Council of Ministers, and the list runs from Robert Bordaz in 1976 through Jean Millier, Jean-Claude Groshens, Jean Maheu, Hélène Ahrweiler, Bozo, François Barré, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, Bruno Racine, Alain Seban and Serge Lasvignes to Laurent Le Bon, in post since 2021. The appointment of Lasvignes in 2015, a senior civil servant who had held no post in the cultural field and was, in Le Monde's phrase, "unknown to the artistic circuits", drew heavy comment; Aurélie Filippetti called it "a return to practices we used to criticise". The building carries the French state's Architecture contemporaine remarquable label.

The centre has pushed its collection outwards from Paris. The Centre Pompidou-Metz, designed by Shigeru Ban with Jean de Gastines and Philip Gumuchdjian, opened on 12 May 2010, its 77-metre spire a nod to 1977; it took close to four million visits between that opening and 1 January 2020. A mobile gallery launched at Chaumont in 2011 pitched camp in provincial towns for a few months at a time until the centre halted the project in 2013 on cost. Around seventy works went on show in 2015 in the subterranean El Cubo at Málaga for a fee of a million euros a year; the agreement signed in September 2014 was renewed for a further five years and again in 2024, the city council undertaking 2.7 million euros a year for 2025–29 and 3.1 million for 2030–34. KANAL–Centre Pompidou took a former Citroën garage on the place de l'Yser that the Brussels-Capital region had bought in October 2015, with the conversion costed at 122 million euros. A Shanghai scheme announced in 2007 by the then president Bruno Racine did not materialise for years, reportedly for want of a legal framework allowing a non-profit foreign institution to operate in China; the Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum opened in 2019 in a wing designed by David Chipperfield. A Seoul museum with the Hanwha Foundation of Culture, agreed by memorandum in 2023, was announced in April 2026 for opening on 4 June 2026 in Tower 63. The Jersey City satellite, approved by the city council with a tax abatement in September 2024 after state and city funding had been withdrawn, was killed when the mayor announced in February 2026 that it would not go ahead. A South American centre at Foz do Iguaçu in Paraná, agreed between France and Brazil in May 2025, is scheduled to launch in November 2027.