Bon Anniversaire to the Pompidou Center

Spotted in the Washington Post on February 1, 2007:
“The Pipe Dream Realized: Paris’s Pompidou Center Turns 30”

I’ll over look the second “s” in the headline for the moment to comment on the controversies surrounding the Pompidou Center in Paris when it was completed and what is rocking the French art world these days.

In 1977, when a new building opened in Paris, it attracted a great deal of controversy at the time for its avant garde design. In the city of light, a new museum decorated with brightly colored pipes rose in the “new Paris.” Here we are now, thirty years later, and the Georges Pompidou Center is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It has become one of Paris’ most recognizable monuments. It holds the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in all of Europe. It is France’s second most visited museum, after the Louvre.

The current controversy, now that Parisians have gotten past the building design, are plans to expand the Pompidou Center to Metz, a city in the northern part of France, and a center in Shanghai, China. These plans, along with plans for a “mini-Louvre” in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, has galvanized the French art world, with protests saying that politicians are “hijacking art for strategic and economic ends.”

As for the Center itself, it was conceived by French President Georges Pompidou (1969-1974), who envisioned a center that would become a magnet for the arts in Paris. The Center that bears his name also holds a library and a center for music research. And, despite the wailing of the French people when it was completed, was so popular that it had to be extensively renovated from 1997 to 1999. It had been designed to handle approximately 5,000 visitors a day and instead saw more than 25,000 a day. In the past 30 years, more than 150 million people have come through the doors.