The President of the Centre Pompidou, Laurent Le Bon, hosted a press conference yesterday (Feb. 6) to announce how the museum would function during its forthcoming five-year closure (2025-2030). The iconic building, conceived of in 1977 by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, will undergo a 260 million euro renovation, mostly funded by the French state. “We are lucky to be in a country where there is public support,” Le Bon said.
The decision to close the institution was made in 2020 as part of a plan to optimize energy efficiency, make the museum more accessible and remove asbestos.
Le Bon opened the conference by addressing the in-house museum worker strikes that ended on January 29, speaking about what had been resolved and what hadn’t. He then pivoted to the focus of the conference—how the museum’s collections will function during its gradual closure, confirming that the new construction would officially begin in 2026 in anticipation of opening in 2030
“J’espère,” he conceded (“I hope”).
In his remarks, Le Bon made a distinction between the physicality of the Centre Pompidou building and “l’esprit”—the spirit—of the Centre Pompidou, which he felt could be easily re-established outside its walls. The press conference was titled “Constellation,” and this idea was a nod to the way the museum’s collection might be enjoyed even outside its distinguished home.
The largest portion of the museum’s holdings will go to a new 30,000-square-meter art center and storage facility in Massy, a banlieue south of Paris that will open in the summer of 2026 when the Centre Pompidou construction begins with the unwieldy name Centre Pompidou Francilien—Fabrique de l’art/Musée national Picasso-Paris.
There will also be exhibitions pulling from the Centre Pompidou’s collections at the to-be-reopened Grand Palais, beginning in June of 2025 with “Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hultén”—highlighting the artist couple and the first museum director of the Centre Pompidou, the latter having collected their work extensively—in a 2,000-square-meter space. In tandem, an art brut ensemble from the collection Decharme consisting of more than 900 works will be shown in a separately demarcated 800-square-meter space. These shows will be followed by the March 2026 “Henri Matisse 1941-1954 – Color Without Limit,” which will feature pieces from the years the artist worked with gouache découpée. About 170 Matisse works from the Centre Pompidou’s collection will be displayed in the exhibition.
The Musée du Louvre will open a show on the objet d’art in October of 2026, in what Le Bon called an “histoire d’amour,” or more than a partnership. Objects dating from the Middle Ages to the Second Empire in the Louvre will stand in contrast to works by Ettore Sottsass, Sheila Hicks, Joan Miró and Eileen Grey. The Philharmonie de Paris, in the 19th arrondissement, will host a show on Kandinsky and music in 2025. And the Musée du Quai Branly and the Musée de l’Orangerie will also host Centre Pompidou collection-focused exhibitions, with programming to be announced.
Outside of Paris, the Pompidou will share works and provide exhibition material to cultural venues in Lille, Lyon, Toulon, Auxerre and of course, its satellite location in Metz. And outside of France, the Centre Pompidous in Málaga and Shanghai will maintain normal operations, supporting the museum’s decentralized approach to the temporary closure. The Kanal space in Belgium is expected to open at the end of 2025; the Centre Pompidou Hanwha-Seoul will open at about the same time in an existing building set to be renovated at some future date. In the U.S., the Centre Pompidou x New Jersey, which will be located in Jersey City, is expected to open in 2027.
While the Centre Pompidou workers involved in the three-month strike referenced “perpetually increasing” damage to artwork “caused by incessant loans” in their November letter to France’s Ministry of Culture, pieces from the museum’s collection are often on the move without incident. Some 6,000 works are lent out by the institution nationally and internationally every year for independent exhibitions.
