Center Georges Pompidou Museum, Paris

Centre Georges Pompidou - actually 'Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou' or 'Centre Pompidou' for short, and often called 'La Raffinerie' or Beaubourg by locals - is one of the most important museums for modern and contemporary art. It was opened in 1977 after six years of construction and houses the most important collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, consisting of modern masterpieces by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Vassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Salvador Dalí, Yves Klein, René Magritte, Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol and many more. In addition to the permanent collection, the Centre Pompidou presents exhibitions on figureheads and founding movements of 20th and 21st century art history.

Escalator accentuated in red

Located in the heart of Paris, in the Quartier du Marais in the 4th arrondisement, the Centre Pompidou is also a special architectural highlight. The building with its pipes, steel girders, glass façades, geometric shapes and different color accents combines the architectural styles of postmodern architecture, brutalism and high-tech architecture. While in other buildings the supply lines and pipes are hidden inside or discreetly arranged, the Centre Pompidou Museum has done exactly the opposite. They were arranged visibly on the outer shell of the building and - like the red-accented escalator, which runs from bottom left to top right like a zigzag route - are deliberately visible and contribute to the industrial appearance of the Centre Pompidou.

From top to bottom

At the Centre Pompidou, it is not just the building that is different and unusual. While on the first floor, on the lowest level coatstandyou will find a store and analog ticket sales on the ground floor, you then take the aforementioned escalator almost all the way to the top, namely to the fifth floor. This is where the exhibition begins, which you experience from top to bottom. If you want to catch a breathtaking view over Paris beforehand or are thirsty or hungry, continue to the sixth floor. Here you will find the 'Georges' restaurant, which can be reached via a terrace with outdoor seating, as well as a glazed corridor that stretches almost the entire 165 meters of the building and offers an excellent view of one side of Paris: Louvre, Notre-Dame, and the Garnier Opera are actually always visible. In good weather, the Eiffel Tower, the Basilica minor Sacré-Cœur and Montmartre can also be seen.

Everything under one roof

Over three million visitors a year come to the Museum of Modern Art, or MNAM for short, whose exhibition rooms were redesigned by the Italian architect and designer Gae Aulenti from 1982-1985 and display some of the most important works of art of the 20th and 21st centuries. As well as the Center for Industrial Design, the research center for music 'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique', ICAM for short, the library 'Bibliothèque Publique d'Information', BPI for short, with over 400,000 media and almost 2,000 reading places, lecture halls, theater, cinema and a children's workshop.

A lot going on

There is always something going on on the Beaubourg Plateau around the Pompidou Center. Street artists often perform here and the Hôtel de Ville, the Forum Les Halles shopping center and the Stravinsky Fountain, designed by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, are in the immediate vicinity.

Collection for industrial design

According to its own information, the industrial design collection comprises around 8,000 works by almost 900 designers, from the 20th century to the present day. These are not only design objects, but above all drawings and other design artifacts that document the creation process of these design objects. The Centre Pompidou's most important collections of post-war design, with over 500 exhibits, include those of Ettore Sottsass Junior, ahead of Philippe Starck (approx. 300), Serge Mouille (approx. 150) and Pierre Paulin (approx. 70). Other international Designer are also represented: Ron Arad, Jasper Morrison, Marcel Wanders, Marcel Breuer, Eileen Gray, Ross Lovegrove etc.

design classics for home

Some of the design objects on display at the Centre Pompidou or in the collection are still produced today as licensed editions by various manufacturers and are available from TAGWERC, the specialist for design classics.