Europe’s first collection of modern and contemporary art in a radical 1970s building
A glass-and-steel icon in the heart of Paris, the Centre Pompidou building was conceived by the architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers as a “living organism” with an inside-out design: column-free spaces inside and pipes on the outside, containing the building’s structural elements. It opened in 1977 as home to Europe’s first and now largest modern and contemporary art collection, and also features performance halls, a cinema, a large reference library and a center for music. With 140,000 works, the collection celebrates countless giants of the avant-garde, far beyond the usual suspects, with masterpieces by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi. A Pompidou outpost opened in the northeastern French town Metz in 2010, followed by one in Málaga in 2015, the KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels in 2018 and the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project in Hong Kong in 2019. The original Paris flagship will be closed for a full-scale renovation from summer 2025 until 2030, when it will stage major exhibitions at the Grand Palais and touring displays with partner institutions in Paris and beyond.
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