From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
October marks the beginning of the art fair season in Paris, as Art Basel Paris, Asia NOW, Design Miami and Paris Internationale draw a who’s who of the modern and contemporary art world to the city, and FAB Paris and Paris Photo follow in November. While the commercial art world is at its busiest and galleries and auction houses hope to profit from a weakening of the London art market after Brexit, the public sphere seems rather less buoyant. This month, the Centre Pompidou, the city’s most important museum of modern art – and one of the most important museums of its kind in the world – is preparing for the onerous task of moving its artworks, ateliers and staff to other sites, in preparation for a total closure for renovation work. The process won’t be complete until September 2025, when it will shut its doors to the public for the next five years.
Earlier this summer during the Olympic Games, in the piazza in front of the Pompidou you could see children scrambling over a pastel-coloured half-pipe called Cycloïde Piazza, an art installation by Raphaël Zarka, created in collaboration with Nike. Behind this miniature skate park, the entire facade of the building rippled with movement, lit up by a vast video projection of athletes bounding or sprinting across the screen with the Nike tick prominently displayed on their clothes. Inside the museum, Gallery 4 was taken over by ‘Art of Victory’, a Nike-sponsored exhibition about Nike and the design of its Air shoes, which was inspired by the Centre Pompidou itself. ‘Nike does have a link with the Centre Pompidou,’ a trade union representative of the museum tells me. ‘But they are also trying to solve budget problems with sponsorship deals. It goes against its mission as a public institution.’
A giant screen showing an advert for for Nike was displayed on the front of the Pompidou Centre during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Photo: AP Photo/Martin Meissner
The exhibition is the latest in a series of commercial partnerships that the museum has nurtured over the past few years. The investigative publication Mediapart reported that last year’s exhibition about the British architect Norman Foster was financed, at least in part, by his agency Foster + Partners and many of the curatorial texts were written by him. When contacted, a spokesperson for the company said only that ‘Norman Foster took a keen interest in the curating of the exhibition’ alongside the Pompidou’s deputy director of architecture and design, Frédéric Migayrou. The president of the Centre Pompidou, Laurent Le Bon, defended the project when I asked him about it last month: ‘We held the exhibition to showcase his work – it’s not meant to be critical. I’m not interested in putting on exhibitions to say that a particular artist is rubbish.’
These sponsorship deals create lines of funding that are needed for the upcoming closure. In 2020, the museum gave the green light to plans for an ambitious refurbishment that aims to completely remove asbestos from the building and carry out a redesign of the interior. The ‘technical’ renovation – renovating the lifts and escalators, treating corrosion, removing asbestos, and replacing the facade and the electricity and water systems – will cost €262 million and will be entirely paid for by the French state. The secondary, ‘cultural’ component of the renovation – the redesign of the interior space – will cost €190 million, of which €90 million still needs to be raised, according to Le Bon. In contrast, MoMA’s 47,000sqm expansion and a radical rehang of the collection in 2019 cost $450 million (€408 million) – and the museum closed for only four months.
Entrance to the exhibition ‘Surrealism’ at the Centre Pompidou in September 2024 in Paris, France. Photo: Luc Castel/Getty Images
The hole in the Centre Pompidou’s budget was revealed by a highly critical report by France’s top audit body, the Cour des comptes, in April this year. The report found that the museum needs to ‘better manage its spending’, has ‘an economic model that is difficult to sustain’ and that the renovation proposal has been ‘insufficiently managed and [its] financing is not guaranteed’. As a public institution, most of the Pompidou’s budget comes from state funding: in 2023, its income for the year was €138.5 million, 68 per cent of which came from state subsidies, while the remaining 32 per cent came from revenues it raised itself. It is the Ministry of Culture that provides the museum’s acquisitions budget, which is €1.8 million – a fraction of the annual sum spent at modern art museums in the UK or the United States. The museum’s annual operating costs were €140.8 million. ‘We always paint a picture of France’s cultural sector as being subsidised, bottle-fed, while Americans have to go out looking for money. But often I have more funding to find than our American colleagues, who receive subsidies through the tax exemption system,’ says Le Bon, who was appointed in 2021.
The renovation plan and the closure it entails has not received much support within the art world. Daniel Templon, the owner of a contemporary art gallery, wrote a damning op-ed in Le Monde in May calling for the Pompidou to cancel its plans for a full closure, and instead close only partially. His piece was followed by a petition, also signed by former Centre Pompidou president Alain Seban, art critic Catherine Millet, former prime minister Manuel Valls and the artist Daniel Buren. At the time of writing the petition has garnered more than 14,700 signatures.
‘The whole plan is absurd,’ Templon tells me. ‘People haven’t caught on yet. But they’re going to wake up and realise they’ve been deprived of a place of culture for five years, minimum.’ He suggests cost is a key factor. ‘Partial closure would make the renovation go on for even longer and it would cost €100 million more … But they haven’t thought about the consequences, the cultural loss.’
The Centre Pompidou is also building a new site in the town of Massy, about 15km south of Paris, which will be at once a conservation and storage space for the Pompidou collection as well as a public-facing venture with exhibitions and a cultural programme. It’s set to open in 2026. The museum has also introduced a new programme called ‘Constellation’, in which artworks will be lent to partners around the world and in France during the closure.
Templon is not impressed: ‘You say “constellation” – I say “consternation”! People come to a museum to see its collection. The Pompidou has the second-largest modern and contemporary art collection in the world, after MoMA. Visitors want to see it all – Léger, Matisse, Picasso, Jeff Koons… That’s the whole point of a collection! You don’t disperse it elsewhere!’
Le Bon, however, is philosophical about how the collection should be used. ‘What’s important for us is that the art is seen,’ he explains. The museum will be able to show more of its artworks by spreading its collection across exhibitions in its partner institutions than it would in its limited space in central Paris. ‘Take the Centre Pompidou as it is currently: we have 2,000 artworks displayed on level 4 and 5 and we have 150,000 artworks in storage. Even if I had 20 museums, I wouldn’t be able to show the entirety of the collection.’
France’s culture minister Rachida Dati has suggested letting commercial galleries in the Marais, one of the neighbourhoods close to the Centre Pompidou, display pieces from the museum’s collection. Templon snorts at the idea of being allowed to exhibit a Kandinsky in his own gallery: ‘You’d have to be stupid to suggest that. She knows nothing – she thinks that galleries and museums do the same thing, that we just display art to the public and that’s it.’ Templon might, however, be surprised to learn that Le Bon supports the idea.
‘Constellation’ is a continuation of the brand-extension exercise that the museum has embarked on over the last decade, which saw it create satellite museums in Málaga, Shanghai and Brussels. Another new museum, Centre Pompidou Hanwha Seoul, will open in South Korea in 2025, concurrently with the Paris site’s total closure. The South Korean defence, finance and retail conglomerate Hanwha will be paying the Centre Pompidou €20 million for the right to use its trademark.
In 2023, five years after France signed a bilateral agreement with Saudi Arabia to help it transform the desert region of AlUla, the Centre Pompidou also set up a partnership with the country worth €2 million a year, almost as though it were simply another arm of the French government. The deal was fiercely criticised, with observers accusing Saudi Arabia of ‘art-washing’ its poor human rights record. ‘We spoke out against the partnership with Saudi Arabia for ethical reasons,’ says the trade union spokesperson. ‘It didn’t make a difference. Management told us, on the contrary, you should make partnerships with these kinds of countries to teach them about culture.’
These lucrative deals might invite criticism that the Centre Pompidou is spreading itself too thinly – but for Le Bon, that’s kind of the point. ‘We have always defined the Centre Pompidou as a place of partnerships and openness to the outside world, long before the adventures of the current government,’ he says. The AlUla site won’t bear the Pompidou name, however, unlike Kanal-Centre Pompidou, the Brussels site that is due to open in 2025 and which is paying the Centre Pompidou €11 million over 10 years in return for the museum’s expertise and the use of its name.
‘We are using our partnership as leverage so we can build the museum we want to,’ explained Yves Goldstein, the director of Kanal. ‘Of course, financially speaking, it’s a good deal for them as well.’ He takes pains to add that Kanal has artistic independence from the Centre Pompidou, and when asked about the Centre Pompidou’s shaky finances, he says, ‘To be honest, my first reaction is: It’s not my problem. It was us that went to the Centre Pompidou to make our dream possible – they didn’t come to us to solve their financial issues.’
Not all of the museum’s international developments have been a success, however. A plan to build another outpost in New Jersey in the United States seemed to stutter earlier this year as the budget ballooned, leading local officials to retract their approval publicly. Le Bon, however, refutes this: ‘It’s not over yet! We’re still in discussions.’ According to Le Monde, the museum was set to receive an initial instalment of €1.5 million as part of the deal this year.
The ‘Arte Povera’ at the Bourse De Commerce Pinault Collection in October 2024 in Paris. Photo by Luc Castel/Getty Images
These attempts to sell the Centre Pompidou trademark or create sponsorship deals with private companies are inevitable, according to Marie Ballarini, a researcher and lecturer in cultural management at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL. She says that museums simply can’t do without private investment nowadays. ‘Museums are being asked to do more and more with smaller budgets. State subsidies aren’t increasing with inflation, plus there’s the rising cost of energy,’ she explains. ‘I’m not shocked by the commercial partnership with Nike because that’s the economic reality for museums.’ Using the museum’s facade as an enormous billboard proves that it’s technically possible – and, she hopes, means that it could also be used to exhibit digital art. ‘But how likely is it that they’ll use it for art when they could use it for sponsored content?’ she adds.
Ballarini also notes the larger competition on the contemporary and modern art scene in Paris. Private foundations and collections such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Lafayette Anticipations and the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce all compete for the same visitors that would go to the Centre Pompidou – and they don’t rely on state subventions. ‘For visitors, they seem like the same thing – they don’t realise that one is private and one is public or that the Fondation Louis Vuitton has no permanent collection, for example,’ she explains.
Five years is a long time for an art institution to be closed. While the Pompidou looks to build its name internationally, the space it will leave behind in Paris risks being quickly filled by private institutions, some of which are just steps away from its site in the centre of the city. From the rotunda of its competitor the Bourse de Commerce, visitors can see the Centre Pompidou’s distinctive architecture and colourful pipework – that is, until it’s covered by scaffolding and closed for business.
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.