I’m spoiled to be a quick metro ride from what is, in my opinion, the museum with the most amazing Modern and Contemporary Art collection in the world: the Centre George Pompidou.
The Centre Pompidou: Mistake or Deeper Meaning?
The Renzo Piano-designed building thumbs its exoskeletal design at sensibility. It laughs in the face of the weather and wear that comes along with being exposed to the multitude of weather systems France is accustomed to. Its stature and aesthetic confused the fourteen-year-old me when I saw it for the first time in a social studies textbook.
I remember wondering if this was on purpose. Had the French run out of money for the exterior? Was this some sort of refinery in the middle of the city? When you walk through the streets of Paris, you are submerged amongst buildings like a bed of kelp. You wade through them, discovering newness in the historical views and vistas. I stumbled upon the Pompidou the first time—I didn’t mean to find it, but the large blue exterior ventilation system stuck out in a sea of buildings that seemed to all be a shade of grey or taupe.
Eternally the optimist, I was in total bliss that there is a building that looks nothing like the rest and also has no real long-lasting armour from the world around it—a building should last, right? Wrong. The Pompidou is closing in September 2025 to undergo extensive renovations. Apparently, the wear and tear was too much.
Five years and half a billion dollars should do the trick, if we listen to the French engineers on the job. They sorted the Seine out for the Olympics, right? None of the world’s top triathletes were taken out by stomach bugs from the murky sewage waters they had to swim through, right?
"Surrealism" at the Pompidou,
4 Sept 2024 - 13 January 2025
Surrealism, by definition, challenges reality. Upon exploring the exhibition, which runs until January, your reality is certainly challenged. The walls seem to lose shape, the floors skew, and, without having a distinct path set out by the curators of the show, you would not know how to navigate the exhibition.
This is a byproduct of the tremendous selection of works. Each work is equally as confusing and disorienting as the last; toying with your train of thought and changing the perspective of what you’re looking at or whose dream you’ve just dove head first into.
The piece that made me pause the most was not one of the many paintings but a throne sculpted by Max Ernst, titled “Capricorn.” It looks like Lucifer’s lounge chair and was positioned recessed into its own room in the exhibition. It wasn’t bathed in light like the majority of the other works in the show; rather, the curation team allowed the lack of light to create a dark drape over its shapes. Upon further research, the pictures of it being used as a chair are more chilling than I could have imagined.
The Persistence of Creativity at the Pompidou
The staff at the Pompidou have done an excellent job this year betting against Father Time, as well as having the Olympics in their backyard during the summer months, to execute on some fantastic exhibitions.
The Constantin Brânçusi Retrospective was filled with some of the most beautiful sculptures I’ve ever set eyes on—not just his own but those of his contemporaries, as well as antiquities that acted as inspiration for his pieces. It was, in fact, so nice that I went twice. The latest exhibition is so amazing it’s, well, surreal. Surrealism: The Centenary Exhibition combined artworks stretching from Salvador Dalí to the lesser known Surrealists, such as Clovis Trouille. It also marked a significant milestone for Surrealism; it stood as the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto published by André Breton in October 1924.
Although the Surrealist Manifesto was written over 100 years ago, and the works have been stored in private collections and museums around the world, seeing them come together under one roof was an eye-opening experience.
We are reminded of the confusion of a day and age that has come and gone, but our current reality and that of these artists still share a strangeness. Perhaps now more than ever.
