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For five years in the late 1980s, I lived just a couple of blocks from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. It wasn't much of a museum back then. Many people found the building's odd, Tinkertoy design out of place in the historic Fourth Arrondissement, one of the city's oldest areas. But for me, the bigger problem was the interior: the dark, shabby entry area, the skimpy amenities, and the relatively cramped exhibition space.
The Pompidou Center, or Beaubourg as it's known to Parisians, has now undergone an $80 million renovation. I've just had a chance to see the museum for the first time since it reopened on Jan. 1, and in my opinion it is hugely improved. The French government was aiming to make Beaubourg the city's main venue for 20th century art, complementing the Louvre's collection from antiquity to 1850, and the Musee d'Orsay's body of mainly Impressionist works from 1850 to 1900. The Pompidou Center is now a key stop on any cultural tour of Paris.
Physically, Beaubourg is a far more inviting than it used to be. The giant, cobblestoned bowl that forms its courtyard is still there, and a motley assortment of street musicians, jugglers, mimes, and small-time hustlers still make it a fun place. The big improvement is that the museum's ground-floor entry area has been opened up into a huge, clean, wide-open space. The stained gray industrial carpeting and the ugly black plasticine flooring have been replaced with light-colored polished cement. And there are now windows in the back wall, giving the space a much airier feel.
GREAT VIEW. A lot of amenities have been added, too. At the west end of the ground floor there's a play-and-learn center for kids. At the east end is a large, quick-service coffee and sandwich shop. Up top, on the sixth level, is the very chichi Georges, one of the city's hottest eateries this year, in part because the Pompidou's upper level provides a stunning view of the city. If you want the view without the expensive meal (lunch for two, with wine, runs at least $100), you can ride the Pompidou's escalators to an observation deck outside the restaurant. But that now costs about $4.50 per person, even if you don't go into the museum to see the art.
Beaubourg was always intended partly as a multimedia research library, and the second and third levels are now largely devoted to that function. In the vast, football-size library areas, there's space for some 5,000 people to study and more than 1,000 computer terminals. You can do everything there from listen to music or view videos to study 130 languages and dialects. On your way up to the third level, be sure to check out the painting on the stairwell wall by Joan Mitchell, the American abstract expressionist painter who lived and worked in France for many years. And you might also want to note that the Pompidou's library is one of Paris' liveliest pickup spots.
For me, the biggest improvement is that the space that houses the Pompidou's Museum of Modern Art has been greatly expanded. In fact, the French now reckon it's the biggest modern art museum in the world. All told, there's 50,000 square feet of exhibition space, half again more than before and enough to hang some 1,400 works. "Contemporary" works (dating from the 1960s to present) are on level four, while the fifth level is devoted to "modern" art, from 1900 to 1960. The selection will be changed periodically.
10 LIZES. There's no blockbuster painting to draw in curiosity seekers the way the Mona Lisa does at the Louvre. But there still are many marvelous, mainly European works in the Pompidou Center collection. Here are some of the works I don't think anyone should miss:
When you enter the fourth level, you're greeted by a large, black-and-white Andy Warhol seriograph of Elizabeth Taylor called Ten Lizes. Around the corner is an early David Hockney painting, Man in a Museum, in which a museum-goer appears about to be overwhelmed by a painted image coming off the wall behind him.
After that, many of the most powerful works are toward the back of the building. These include a portrait of an elephant-eared, deformed-looking boy called Ralf III by the German artist Georg Baselitz; Ravine, a demolished landscape crawling with bugs by American Philip Guston; and Child's Games, a huge, colorful canvas by Sigmar Polke. Other powerful works by lesser-known artists include Mixed Blood, water-color portraits of children of ethnically mixed parentage by Marlene Dumas, and Exekution, by Markus Lüpertz.
SIMILARITIES. The greater treasures are up above, on the fifth level. The first thing you see is two extraordinary paintings, both done in 1907. On the right is Le Luxe I, a large Matisse canvas of three nude figures; on the left is Seated Nude by Pablo Picasso. The paintings are hung side-by-side to emphasize the similarities in style at that point between Matisse and Picasso -- the thinly applied paint that leaves patches of bare canvas showing, the dark outlining of the figures, the lack of detail in the rendering of the faces and bodies. Further back on the floor, there's a whole room full of paintings by Matisse and Pierre Bonnard that shows the similarities between them, including the way the clothing on the figures melds into the furniture and the decorative tapestry on the walls.
There isn't time here to go through all the other striking works on that floor. A few not to missed are a self-portrait in pencil by the mad French playwright Antonin Artaud; Still Life with Dancers by Emil Nolde; The Corpse 1908 by Marc Chagall; The Sculptor by Chaim Soutine; and The Figures in a Room and Van Gogh in a Landscape by Francis Bacon. The selection of photos is small but includes some of the greatest works by Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson. And don't miss the cabinet full of bent wire sculptures by Alexander Calder.
Whether the new, improved Beaubourg can become a truly great museum is unclear. A lot will depend on the quality of the shows in the temporary galleries, such as the current one of Picasso sculptures. And the building, which opened in 1977, still looks dingy, despite renovations. It may be that the far-out design by architects Richard Rodgers and Renzo Piano -- which put the air ducts and piping on the outside of the building rather than the inside -- simply isn't sturdy enough to hold up without frequent overhauls.
But whatever its shortcomings, the Pompidou Center is now a far better place to visit than it was back when it was my neighborhood cultural center.
Peterson is contributing editor for Business Week Online. Follow his moveable feasts, every week only on BW Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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