The Pompidou Center will build a museum complex in Massy, ​​a suburb of Paris

The Pompidou Center in Paris announced the start of construction of a new museum complex in Massy, ​​a suburb of the capital. The €105 million building will combine the storerooms of the Pompidou Center and the Picasso Museum in Paris with exhibition spaces, workshops, and concert halls. When completed in 2026, the new Center Pompidou Francilien—Fabrique de l’Art / Musee national Picasso Paris will be able to rival the main Parisian contemporary art museums. According to the correspondent of “Kommersant” in France Alexey Tarkhanov.

Not only museum workers, but also people of power gathered to present the project. The president of the Pompidou Center Laurent Le Bon and the director of the Picasso Museum Cécile Debret were joined by the presidents of the department and the commune, the mayor of the city of Massy and the president of the Île-de-France region, the well-known politician and former presidential contender Valerie Pecresse. And, of course, the Pompidou Museum team, headed by director Julie Narbe, builders and architect Philippe Chambaretta.

Philippe Chambaretta, whose workshop PCA-Stream was entrusted with the project, paraphrased several important compositional techniques of the Parisian Pompidou. The place of the sloping square, created by the Italian Renzo Piano on the model of the Sienese Piazza del Campo, will be occupied by the artificial lake existing in Massi. The length of the building will correspond to the Pompidou, but the height will be half that, which means that the reflection will double it. The architect also reproduced the famous inclined escalator, but in the form of an ordinary staircase, also rising along the facade. There are two exhibition blocks, two rooms for storing exhibits, and restoration workshops.

For the Parisian Pompidou, this is an important acquisition. The National Museum, with its 140,000 works in its collection, is Europe’s richest collection of contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Spaces are just as important for the Picasso Museum in Paris, housed in a restored mansion. This is the most complete monographic museum of the artist, because it is made up of the collections of his heirs, which they transferred to the museum from 1979 to 2021.

The center in Massy is designed for 30,000 sq. meters (for comparison: the exhibition halls of the New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val in Moscow – about 12,000 square meters), of which 24,900 are allocated to the Pompidou Center, 2,100 to the Picasso Museum, and the rest are given to the city for master classes, seminars, concerts – transitional spaces between the suburbs and art, where they should meet each other. This was one of the conditions for support from the city and regional authorities. “We would never agree to give money just for an art warehouse,” said Valerie Pekress, recalling that they invested €40 million out of the €105 million that the center will cost.

Construction will begin in July 2024. They hope to finish it in 2026, since in 2025 the Pompidou Center in Paris will close for the long-awaited reconstruction, which will last until 2030. At this time, not only collections, but also exhibitions will go out of town to Massy. Laurent Le Bon specifically thanked Mayor Nicolas Samson for the fact that the city sold the building site for a symbolic €1.

Massy is a typical suburb, but it is naive to imagine it as a cultural desert. The city already has the only stationary Opera de Massy in the vicinity of Paris and its own orchestra, the Salle Paule B concert hall, and the Paris-Saclay University, the third in the new ranking of French universities, operates nearby. As Valerie Pecresse recalled, a quarter of the French research institutes moved here: “If you want to educate scientists, creators of the future, they need art.”

You have to give the speakers their due. During speeches, no one ever stumbled over the three-story name Center Pompidou Francilien—Fabrique de l’Art / Musee national Picasso Paris. Unless President Le Bon expressed confidence that the people’s ingenuity would invent a more convenient nickname, and one of the speakers even suggested the frivolous “PomPicard”. Pompidou already has a branch opened in 2010 in the city of Metz in Moselle. But it, like other major Parisian museums, did not have branches directly behind the Parisian ring road. Disneyland or Asterix Park were responsible for the culture here. That is why the regional authorities paid such attention to the project – and not in words, which is easy, but in money.

You can fight for republican order in the suburbs, as the Ministry of Internal Affairs does, sending new police reinforcements there. And you can try to change the quality of life there. Not through social handouts, which often serve as an excuse for second-rateness, but through the maintenance of cultural equality. The new project is one of such attempts, although it does not change much in the current situation, but it sets a certain trend. About what the president of the Essonne department said so directly at a press conference, noting that it was not taking place anywhere, but “in the future Paris branch of the famous Center Pompidou in Massy.”