As Centre Pompidou Closes for 5 Years, Parisians Said Goodbye

The outdoor balconies of Paris’s Centre Pompidou are one of the best places to take in the city’s iconic skyline. This past weekend, as the warm weather hinted at the arrival of spring, the balconies were full of families picnicking, taking in the sun,  and this being Paris, couples embracing.

Many were also there to bid farewell to the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection, which closed Monday night. In September, the iconic building will fully close for five years of renovations. To mark the occasion, the museum—considered Paris’s top institution for modern and contemporary art—celebrated with a long weekend of festivities, along with free entry to the collection.

But on such a balmy afternoon, several visitors on the museum’s balconies admitted they hadn’t even made it to the galleries yet. Christian Themistocle, 21, and Auriane Sebban, 22, pulled apart from each other’s locked arms, just enough to tell ARTnews that they had come from a nearby suburb with every intention of seeing the collection before it closes — a display including some 2,000 artworks, dense with masterpieces by Chagall, Dubuffet, and Delaunay, to name a few. But so far, the building’s outdoor space had proven too strong to resist.

“We really did plan to go inside,” said Themistocle, a student in design school, who has regularly used the museum’s free, public library, which closed earlier this month. “This place is an extra special thing we have in the city, and it’s really a shame it’s closing,” he added.

Indeed, one reason the Pompidou will be so sorely missed, is because visitors don’t even need to go into the galleries to enjoy it. More than just a museum, among other things, it houses an extensive public library, with its own balconies, one of the city’s best art book stores, a rooftop restaurant, theatres for films and live performances, a curated design boutique, and an iconic, clear glass escalator on the outside of the building’s façade, known as the “chenille,” or caterpillar. Visitors don’t have to show a ticket until they walk into a gallery, meaning they can pretty freely explore much of the rest of the Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers-designed building, with its inside-out concept of exposed, brightly painted tubes in primary colors.

It’s little surprise that its shuttering for such a long period has upset many, including workers who went on a series of strikes over the last year against the project, and what it could mean for their job security. Some leaders in the local art scene have also been vocal about their disapproval. Last year, a petition signed by longtime Paris dealer Daniel Templon, artist Daniel Buren, and former Centre Pompidou president Alain Seban, along with about 14,800 others, called the idea of closing the whole building “a serious error,” and insisted parts could have been kept open during renovations.

Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon has rejected that idea as unmanageable. The building requires extensive technical repairs, including asbestos removal, in addition to an ambitious “cultural” project to redesign the interior, by architects Moreau Kusunoki and the Frida Escobedo Studio, together costing a total $485 million. At a press conference outlining the plan, Le Bon reiterated that parts of the Pompidou’s collection would travel to exhibitions in France and abroad, throughout the renovations, as part of a program dubbed “Constellation.”

“This museum was controversial from the very beginning,” Aurore Tixier, a local who came with her family to see the permanent collection before it closed, told ARTnews. “To have this building, right in the heart of Paris — it’s true that it’s nothing like what you see around you, and yet it symbolizes something. It’s the ‘70’s, and president [Georges Pompidou], who wanted it … and it’s a museum that is always very alive.”

Tixier used the library when she was a student, taking breaks from her studies to see artwork. “There are a lot of libraries all around Paris, but none like this one,” she said. She added that it was especially important she bring her daughter this last weekend, now eight years old, “because when the center reopens, she’ll have grown up a lot, and she’ll be completely different.”

That had occurred to me too. My children, Kassie, 11, and Eloise, 8, say the Pompidou is one of their favorite Paris museums. Suddenly, with its closing, their growing up has come into sharper view, and in response, I’ve been taking them back regularly, in the hopes they’ll hold onto memories of the place, and that I too, might hold onto what I can of this time with them. 

We’ve been back to their favorites, like Jean Dubuffet’s Le Jardin d’Hiver [Winter Garden] (1968-1970), a cave of black and white jigsaw shapes, which Eloise calls, “The North Pole Melting Room.” And Le magasin de Ben [Ben’s Store] (1958-1973), a “total art center” by the French artist, Ben. They love riding the outdoor escalator up to the top floor, plus the children’s exhibit and activity area, and, for this closing weekend, they participated in the museum’s special arts and craft workshops, including a group painting led by Japanese artist Makiko Furuichi.

At breakfast, I asked why they like the Pompidou so much, and what they think will change about their visits there, when they are well into their teens. “It doesn’t look like other museums. It looks like a factory,” said Eloise. “Some museums are made with white walls and that’s not very original, or they’re made from castles, which is also not too original, but the Pompidou is different.”

As for looking ahead, “when you’re an adult, you get serious, and you want to study [the art], look at the history or something,” said Kassie. But “when you’re a kid,” added Eloise. “You want to play with it.”

“If you’re a kid, you just go to the museum, and you discover the piece, and then you like it, and feel that it’s pretty,” Eloise continued. “You really feel it!”

Would they still have fun, play, and “feel” the artworks in six years? “I don’t really think I’ll want to go to museums then, because I’ll have a phone,” said Eloise. “Each time I see a teenager, they’re always on their phone and bored,” she added with a laugh. Fair enough.

Others visiting this weekend, also said that its closing had made them more aware of this current phase of their lives, and think about where they might be in six years.

Jean-Marc and Marie Millot, both in their late 60s, came to the museum from Burgundy to catch its closing exhibitions. “We’re pretty old, and we told ourselves that it’s no given we’ll be around when it reopens,” said Jean-Marc. “It’s closing for such a long time, and will leave a real gap in the city’s palette of museums,” he added. The couple said that they remember when it opened in the ‘70s and admitted that, like many in France, they were not immediately convinced. “It was surprising at first. We weren’t fans in the beginning, but when you visit the interior, it’s a whole other story. It’s grown on us,” said Marie. “It has a certain charm.”

Documentary filmmakers Stephanie Magnant and Philippe Lainé, made sure to take a photo of their 11-year-old on the museum’s top floor, with the city in the background, in the same spot where they photographed him 10 years ago, then just a baby. “We do wonder why it’s closing for so long,” Lainé told ARTnews, though the couple trusted the museum had its reasons for doing so, despite some recent questions about the funding of the project, outlined in an audit. “We’re also wondering about the neighborhood’s economy. What’s going to happen for the merchants around here, the bars? It’s going to be complicated,” he said.

“It’s going to leave a huge hole in the city,” Magnant added.

I explained to my kids that many adults do actually try to let go, even play, discover, and “feel” the artworks the way they described, without worrying about who is who. But I couldn’t argue with the fact that to them, at least for now, that comes naturally. My only solution is that until the Pompidou reopens, we’ll just have to go play in other museums in Paris and see what we can find.