Centre Pompidou

Important notice: the Centre Pompidou building in Paris closed to the public on 22 September 2025 for a complete renovation and is not expected to reopen until around 2030. The galleries, the library and the escalators are shut, and the collection is being shown at other venues in Paris, at Centre Pompidou Metz and abroad under the museum's Constellation programme. This guide describes the building and the best known works of the collection so that you can recognise them wherever they travel, and so that you can enjoy the piazza and the Stravinsky Fountain, which remain open outside.

The Centre Pompidou opened in 1977 on the Beaubourg plateau in the heart of Paris. Designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, it turned architecture inside out, hanging its escalators, pipes and ducts on the outside in bright colours so that the interior could be left as open floors. Parisians hated it, then loved it, and it became one of the most visited buildings in Europe. Inside it houses the Musée national d'art moderne, the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe with more than one hundred and twenty thousand works, along with a public library, a cinema, performance spaces and the music research institute IRCAM.

When the building reopens the collection will return to its upper floors, where the twentieth century used to unfold from Fauvism and Cubism through Kandinsky, Matisse and Duchamp to Pop Art and video, with contemporary art below and a rooftop view over Paris. Until then, the works described here are the ones to look out for in the museum's touring exhibitions.