The neighbors first, then the regular visitors began to say goodbye on Friday with a great party hasa two in the morning inside one of the cultural symbols of the city. He began to close the doors of his permanent collection on Monday, but first he wanted to celebrate it with his people. The capital of France, that is the bad news, will remain without this fabulous cultural space and citizen meeting for five years due to deep renewal and sanitation works. The closure will also coincide fatally with the partial closure of the Louvre to carry out the renewal project announced by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron.
The approximately 2,000 works of art exposed permanently at 12,000 m² (the two upper levels) will be transferred in large trucks to other museums in Paris, in other parts of France or abroad. “This colossal operation has required months, and even years of preparation,” Claire Garnier, production director, told AFP. To move monumental facilities such as those of German artist Anselm Kiefer, it will be necessary, for example, to disassemble some windows of the building, he says.
accessible to all audiences. The then French president could not see the finished work. But soon it became a kind of public square that today receives an average of four million annual visitors. The huge tubular and multicolored building, designed by the architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, has also become one of the most visited monuments in Paris. The idea of the building was to take out all its guts -Ventilation and driving- to the outside to get a diaphanous and perfect space for the samples. But, in addition, his striking design made him an icon of what the museums and buildings that house them were going to be in the coming decades.
The collection will remain exposed. The public can continue to admire a good part – which has around 150,000 works, which makes it the largest in the world along with MoMA – in the Grand Palais renewed in Paris, where there are already several large programmed exhibitions. It will also continue to be visible abroad thanks to the associations of the Pompidou Center with Malaga (Spain), Shanghai and soon Brussels, in addition to important museums in the United States, Australia, Japan and Europe.
The closure will be progressive. But the Pompidou, opened in 1977, will close completely on September 22 after its last temporary exhibition, dedicated to Wolfgang Tillmans, until 2030. Since its inauguration on January 31, 1977, 48 years ago, very high assistance figures have been recorded. But, in addition, the structure of the museum, the type of samples and the way of ordering its permanent collection marked the path of many other contemporary art museums in the world.
The main objective of the works is to completely eliminate the asbestos of the facade to “respond to security standards,” according to Pompidou. It will also proceed to change all the windows and the corrosion that suffers the main structure and all the metal locks will be discussed. In addition, paint and floors will be renewed and the elevators, forklifts and metal stairs of the forum, among others, will be changed or modernized.
