140,000 works are moving in the fall and some will travel around the world

The Center Pompidou in Paris will close its doors until 2030 for major work. The moving of the collections will begin in the fall. They will be massively redeployed in France and abroad.

It is one of the most important modern art museums in the world. The Center Pompidou will begin its move in October 2024 and will completely close its doors in the summer of 2025, its president Laurent Le Bon announced on Tuesday February 6 during a press conference. All the works will therefore still be visible during the Paris Olympic Games.

The first closures to the public will take place at the beginning of 2025. The performance halls, the museum and the library should no longer be accessible from March. However, construction will not begin until 2026. The cost of the renovations, financed by the State, is estimated at 260 million euros.

Laurent Le Bon took the opportunity of this project to imagine a new Center Pompidou without losing the“spirit”. This Beaubourg 2.0 will see the light of day in 2030 with a new display of works and a forum entirely dedicated to youth and emerging creation. The president of the center also plans to create a virtual museum on the internet. He estimates this project at “180 million euros” and intends to raise the necessary funds with the help of the “patronage”, “circulation of works” And “the possible association of another country”.

Rehousing 140,000 works

While only 3,000 works are permanently exhibited, the Center Pompidou has around 140,000 art objects. Part of the collections will be housed at the Grand Palais, under construction since 2021. Created with its immense glass roof for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, this building is due to reopen its doors in April. Its museum spaces will be open to visitors again in October 2025. Until then, they will house the fencing and taekwondo events of the Paris Olympic Games, its director Didier Fusillier told AFP.

Two galleries of 2,000 and 800 square meters will host four annual exhibitions with works from the Center Pompidou’s national collections. The artists Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Pontus Hultén, who was the first director of the National Museum of Modern Art, will inaugurate the series. The Grand Palais will then host Bruno Decharme’s immense collection of outsider art, comprising 921 works by 242 artists, an exceptional donation in 2022 to Pompidou. An exhibition dedicated to Henri Matisse and color will be installed behind the glass roofs in March 2026.

Redeploy agents

The Grand Palais will also employ most of the 400 Center Pompidou agents (out of a thousand in total) affected by the move. Worried about their jobs during the closure, some of these agents led an intermittent strike for three months, causing the museum to be closed for 24 days. An agreement signed by two majority unions out of five put an end to it ten days ago, announced by the new Minister of Culture Rachida Dati.

All agents (security, fire safety, reception, surveillance, ticketing, technicians, administrative) will continue their missions on other sites including the Grand Palais. Some will then go to Massy (Essonne) where a Pompidou Center in the Ile-de-France region is due to open in 2026, dedicated to the conservation of works and creation.

Pompidou beyond borders

From the fall of 2026, the Louvre must also house part of the permanent collections. This concerns modern and contemporary works by Pompidou around “the notion of Object”. They will be next to collections of decorative arts objects, from the Middle Ages to the Second Empire.

A vast program will also see 6,000 to 8,000 works from the collections scattered in other Parisian museums (Orsay, Orangerie, Jeu de Paume, Guimet, Quai Branly…) at the Center Pompidou in Metz, in the region, in Martinique and in Guadeloupe as well as abroad. Nine traveling exhibitions are planned, devoted in particular to Brancusi, Chagall and the Delaunays.

On the international side, the Pompidou Center has long exported its brand to Malaga and Shanghai, and is due to open a future center in Seoul. A Pompidou Center “American style” is also due to open in Jersey City near New York in 2027 and the museum has signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia to “bring your expertise” to the creation of a museum on the Al-Ula site. It is also supporting the Brazilian state of Paraná in the creation of an art museum, scheduled to open in 2026.