On February 2nd, 1977, the Georges Pompidou Centre opened its doors in a climate of controversy. In view of its metallic architecture, the debate it sparked was marked with nostalgia for the beauty of the art of the past. In spite of this controversy, a huge crowd rushed to visit it from day one and has never waned since. This contradiction was reflected in the President of the Republic who inaugurated the monument: Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was not the most enthusiastic supporter of the project, but the power and success it represented for France forced him to put a good face on it.

What were the major innovations sought for by the art-loving president who gave his name to the Pompidou Centre?

Above all, it was a cultural centre with a multidisciplinary function, which placed each artistic discipline in relation to its neighbours. Visual art rubbed shoulders with literature, design, art cinema, performance art, music, and many others. The goal was to allow visitors to decompartmentalise, look at, feel, understand, and immerse themselves in their time and keep abreast with it through its most distinctive artistic forms, points in common, differences, ruptures, and origins — in a word, through its history and its present.

The Pompidou Centre and all the projects it brought to life so thoroughly changed the relationship between the public and the art of its time that it is difficult to remember what a cultural shock it was for this ‘new public’.

What did the jury members who chose the project by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers see in the design of this new pedagogy of art, one that was at once so near and so far from the public of its time?

The architecture of the Pompidou Centre, so denigrated at the time, was representative of an industrial and cultural revolution. The world had changed, artists’ studios had become factories, design was breaking out of the confines of industrial plants, abundant fuel had revolutionised the way people circulated around the world — a movement that transformed lifestyles was gathering momentum. And this is the movement reflected in the architecture of the Pompidou Centre.

This building, as its architects have said, is not a building, but a moving engine, one that is scalable and flexible — it is a living tool. In theory, it can be disassembled or expanded. Its mandate is to show the force and originality of the twentieth century expressed in film, television, computers, spacecraft, in order to connect them to art and create a dialogue among them, since this is the expressive context shared by artists from all the disciplines. The transparency of the facade invited members of the public outside into a dialogue with those inside the Centre, to which admission was free — especially the entrance lobby, called the Forum, which was originally designed as a passageway between two streets, the Rue du Renard and the Rue Quincampoix. When you crossed this Forum, intended as a covered square extending the Centre’s exterior square, you walked into a ‘centre in the centre,’ where all the branches of the Centre’s many departments could be found. This meant that a pedestrian crossing the square could make a detour through an exhibition gallery or read a review along the way. We will come back to this, because today this forum has become a cultural shopping centre, the institution’s cash cow.

The escalator that runs across the entire facade, and which visitors have to take in order to access the various inside spaces, frees the interior of a large number of lifts while also serving as ‘a climbing street’ — the people on the moving staircase create a human fresco, infusing it with life. The public was meant to be part of the architecture and its movement. The escalator also offered one of the most beautiful views of Paris and suggested a link between the past and the present, which awaited visitors inside.

The arrangement of the Centre’s spaces was intended to express its cultural policy. The apparent complexity reflected that of a city and its mysteries. The idea was to reproduce the streets, a square, and houses, so that the encounter with art would be as unexpected and familiar as an encounter in the city. But, as in every city, maps and plans also allow people to take their bearings, and give meaning and an identity to each neighbourhood.

Two movements flowed at a different pace.

The temporary shows took place in the ‘common’ spaces: the basement, the main lobby, the ground floor, and the fifth floor. The works exhibited in the Musée nationale d'art moderne (MNAM), located on the third and fourth floors, and those in the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI), located on the first and second floors, formed part of the permanent collections.

The Centre presented itself as a Ferris wheel of exhibitions and temporary shows that rotated around a fixed space, whose two hearts are the museum and the library.

The unity, strength, and novelty of the Centre lay in how these two movements met up, in the confluence of the common spaces, which were designed to invite the public to come back often and discover something new each time. Entrance to these spaces was always free, whether to take in contemporary art and architecture shows, read books, visit the children’s workshop and library, view the monumental exhibits in the Forum, or attend concerts, dance performances, conferences, or debates in the basement.

On the fifth floor, there were the major exhibitions that made history, like the cycle of shows conceived by Pontus Hultén, Paris‑Berlin, Paris-Moscow, Paris-New York, and Paris-Paris. Life at the heart of the Centre (the museum and the library) went on at a different pace, with a more inward, limited rhythm, as if punctuating the spiral that surrounded it.

This principle guaranteed the huge success of the Pompidou Centre from the moment it opened its doors. The public discovered the joy of being able to move around in the midst of this hive of artistic expressions, which were meant to be discovered or compared with the old masters — because the route around the museum began with the Impressionists and the Fauvists, which linked up with the latest pieces in the Musée d’Orsay collections, and continued up until today.

So how did the Pompidou Centre evolve?

When it opened, the scenography of the collections, the themes of the major temporary exhibitions on the fifth floor, and the exhibitions in the Forum and the mezzanine were all innovative with respect to academic criteria.

The presentation of the permanent collections at the opening of the Pompidou Centre was based on a museological principle common to all its spaces, whether they housed works of art or documents. The key words were mobility, flexibility, transparency, freedom of movement, a gateway to the city, and so forth. The principle was to encourage a panorama view of various works by different artists of the same period, in order to stimulate learning about the artistic scene while at the same time showing differences, variations, and connections between them. So the moment you walked in, works by Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Braque, and Bonnard were all to be discovered in the same field of view. As the Centre’s first director, Pontus Hultén, once said, ‘The proposed layout was a guiding thread for visitors to follow, taking its inspiration from the form of cities, with squares, streets, and dead-end alleys, and acknowledging the alternation of motivation, interest and even fatigue.’

On the third floor, paintings by the Fauvists led to Chagall, whose works were on the fourth floor, all the way to the post-World War II works of Matisse, Léger and Picasso, and then, separated by a fire wall, came contemporary French and international art. The whole labyrinthine layout was meant to suggest a history of art woven with multiple relations.

In the early days, the fifth floor hosted the large-scale, multidisciplinary exhibitions Paris-New York, Paris-Berlin, Paris-Moscow, Paris-Paris, once again with the idea of a multiple history; this time mixing up the artists’ works with design, posters, literature, music, and so on. They created large frescoes of the history of art in the twentieth century, which shared their space with the monographic exhibitions on prominent artists of the twentieth century, such as Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Dalí, and Magritte.

In the Forum, at the centre of the Centre, a pit provided a place for monumental works to be displayed, always on a temporary basis. There was the Crocrodrome created by Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Bernard Luginbuhl, as well as Daniel Spoerri’s La Boutique aberrante. These were followed by Dalí’s mural decorations for the World Exhibition, Picasso’s backdrop project for Le Train bleu, three musical totems by Takis, an immersive video environment by Nam Jun Paik, and sculptures by Alexander Calder, among others. The ‘environment’ as a work of art was the first thing visitors experienced. The visual shock they received when coming into the Centre set the tone of the venue they were entering.

Not that this stopped them from exploring the surrounding spaces, which, while more modest, were no less innovative. The ‘Artist’s Studio’ was a room dedicated to a different young artist each month. Spaces like the Galeries contemporaines, the Salle Animation, the Salon Photo, and the forum gallery presented the latest concepts in the art world, whether in cinema, photography, or fine art by major artists from France and from around the world.

The Museum’s programming ran alongside the exhibition hall of the Centre de Création Industrielle (contemporary architecture, design, and furniture). But it also rubbed shoulders with the Salle d’Actualité in the public library, which gave free access to newspapers from around the world and a selection of books, and to the children’s workshops and a room for discussions and conferences.

Forty years later, what remains of this profusion, this freedom of movement, this transdisciplinarity that led to the worldwide success of the Pompidou Centre?

Like anywhere else, but more often in France than elsewhere, the Centre has become institutionalized, closed off, and centralised. Its Forum now resembles, more than anything else, a cultural shopping centre.

The monumental works, the artist’s studios, the Salon photo, the perennially crowded Salle d'actualité, the children’s workshop are no more. The pit is empty. An elevator has been installed in it, to go down to the lower floor. Free admission to the entrance lobby is also a thing of the past. All that remains are ticket counters, a large café on the mezzanine, a bookstore, a boutique selling objects of all kinds — from colouring books based on Matisse’s works to salad bowls or teapots signed by fashionable designers — terminals for buying tickets to the Museum and to the exhibitions, and queues to the all-in-one ticket windows.

In a word, this Forum, which was designed as a space for freely exploring the various activities of the Centre — the library, the museum, the Centre for Industrial Design, the Centre for Musical Research — has become a venue to open up your purse strings. Taking the escalators up to the fifth floor, where you used to be able to admire the view of Paris from a beautiful terrace, is no longer possible without an entrance ticket. In its place, a luxurious restaurant called Georges, after President Pompidou’s first name, has been installed.

The wheel-shaped movement that framed the museum and the library has been jammed and no longer turns so roundly or so widely.

Financial demands certainly have their weight: profitability is paramount today. Other critical factors cannot be forgotten: security problems have become increasingly important and have led to severe limitations on the freedom of circulation. The spirit of post-1968 has also faded away — now what we need is cleanliness and control. True, the entrance square to the Centre was gradually becoming a sort of ‘court of miracles’: a gathering place for beggars and street people. And then, of course, the management teams no longer have the enthusiasm or competence they had at the beginning. The recent heads of the Centre, often appointed as a reward for political services, are technocrats rather than people dedicated to the arts. The exhibition curators and commissioners come from politically correct backgrounds and lack the imagination of the ‘founding fathers’. There is also the fact that the world of art and culture have changed profoundly, and have ‘merchandised’ themselves to extremes.

The presentation of the collections, too, has become subdued.

In 1981, Dominique Bozo, Pontus Hultén’s successor, commissioned Gae Aulenti to remodel the interior architecture in order to make it more ‘classic’ and museum-like. The open museography, which showed at a glance the main phases of modernity along with their connections and collisions, gave way to a rearrangement based on a greater concentration of canvases, grouped according to movements and artists. It must be said that the collection has been incredibly enriched over the years, allowing magnificent displays of sets of works by Léger, Picasso, or Miró. The new museography thus created a museum inside the museum.

The arrangement on the fourth floor can be said to offer a view of the history of the museum’s collection and of the history of the twentieth century. Documentary spaces provide a context for each group of works. On the third floor, the prevailing view is of the present, starting with contemporary works, some of which are less than two years old. With ceiling heights doubled to accommodate the increasing size of the works, the artists of today are presented on a rotating basis, as temporary exhibitions within the permanent collections. Architecture and design exhibitions are also assigned to this space.

Instead of a city, where you got lost to discover things that you were not looking for, the current museography is more like a large avenue that highlights the sculpture and gives access to a series of perpendicular alleys opening onto art galleries.

Another transformation in the direction of rationality was the integration of the Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI) into the Musée nationale d'art moderne. The activities of the cci and the museum have been melded together. Rooms devoted to the design of the 1950s with Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand, after a few Bauhaus models, are presented as part of the itinerary through the museum’s modern and contemporary collections. Contemporary design objects are integrated into the route leading through the art of today. Here too the works linked to industrial creation have been museified and placed in order. They deserve a consecration of this sort, but the arrangement diminishes and diffuses the impact of the contemporary works.

After the large multidisciplinary exhibitions, there came the large monographic exhibitions of the 1980s: Pierre Bonnard, Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, De Chirico, Matta, and many others. This series of presentations of the major artists of the twentieth century continued, and continues, by creating connections with artists from the late twentieth century, and even with artists of today such as Koons or, more recently, Hockney. However, there is a lack of largescale projects. When will we get to explore a major Europe-Africa or Europe-Asia exhibition of young artists? In the wake of globalisation, a new version of the 1989 Magiciens de la Terre exhibition would be welcome, giving the curating role back to critics and talent-spotters instead of to the advisers of the big collectors.

The way the Pompidou Centre has evolved has not stood in the way of its success.

The National Museum of Modern Art has one of the most beautiful collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. The exhibitions at the Centre are always of high quality. However, over the past few years, the strong competition of private foundations and art centres has to be taken into account: these include the Cartier Foundation (jewellery, watches, Cartier’s ‘musts’), which has been open for some time now; the recent Vuitton Foundation (Vuitton, Guerlain, champagnes, liqueurs, perfumes, etc.); and soon the Pinault Foundation (Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Boucheron, Alexander McQueen, Bottega Veneta) in the old Stock Exchange building, which is situated very close to the Centre. These are equally prestigious places with no dearth of money and ideas. Today the Pompidou Centre seems to be lacking in both.

The Pompidou Centre changed the relationship between contemporary art and the general public. It also contributed, through its very success, to the development of an art market that is now in the hands of big financial powers, for which the works also serve as investments and brand promoters. This success has led to a curious pendulum effect, one that again distances the public from contemporary art, but this time because of its price. Today, contemporary art has once more become inaccessible: new style leaders have appeared on the scene — the billionaires and the major forces in the luxury market.

The architecture of the Centre has not been altered; it is as surprising as ever. So much so, that — as the ultimate paradox — the building has been classified as a ‘historic monument’. Its entrance into history may unfortunately be a step away from life.

*Translated by Zakiya Hanafi