IT IS THIRTY years since the Centre national d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, the fantastic tubular machine by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, arose phoenix-like from the ashes of Paris’s demolished Beaubourg district. A building conceived as an anti-monument has become perhaps the most popular of all Parisian landmarks, the inspiration for every city-defining museum and gallery from Fort Worth to Bilbao. The Pompidou is celebrating its anniversary in style, with the recent exhibition Airs de Paris, a labyrinthine survey of art and design made in the French capital during the last three decades; a retrospective, opening in November, of the work of the Richard Rogers Partnership; and, most significantly, a new presentation of the permanent collections of the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle. Following two years during which, alternately, each of the two floors allocated to the Museum was closed while an essential fire prevention system was installed, the collections are now back on show in their most coherent arrangement to date.

Ever since Picasso donated ten paintings to the fledgling Museum in 1947, the MNAM has been extraordinarily fortunate in the gifts and bequests it has received from artists and their heirs. Many have given large bodies of work and some have transferred to the Museum the entire contents of their studios, down to the last cigarette butt. The atelier is therefore an expedient theme around which an essentially chronological hang of the early modern collection is organised, on the Pompidou’s fifth floor. It opens with a dazzling selection from the Kandinsky bequest, and goes on to highlight several other collections within the collection: the 1964 Delaunay gift, which illustrates the development of Robert and Sonia Delaunay throughout their careers; the extraordinary assembly of more than eight hundred ‘unfinished’ paintings by Rouault which the artist kept beside him in his studio tothe end of his life; and a recreation of part of André Breton’s studio, chock-a-block with the work of his contemporaries, ethnographic objects and Surrealist souvenirs, acquired by the Museum four years ago. (One of the most beautiful ofall reconstructed artists’ studios, the Atelier Brancusi, is of course on view in the Pompidou’s plaza). These take their place in a nicely varied, well-paced sequence of roomsthat focus on individual figures (Malevich, Léger, Picabia, Giacometti, Dubuffet et al.), pairs or groups of artists, movements, historical events (the 1937 Exposition Internationale), magazines (Cahiers d’Art, Documents) or galleries (Der Sturm, Galerie Maeght). Some of the monographic displays areoutstanding in their lucidity, none more so than the twogalleries devoted to Matisse (Fig.I). ‘Dialogue’ rooms marry predictable pairings – Picasso and Braque, Gris and Laurens, Miró and Calder – but with admirable cogency. The post-War rappel à l’ordre is nicely delineated in a room hungwith portraits by, among others, Derain, Beckmann, Dixand Balthus; and Surrealism, in its various manifestations, is exceptionally well treated. Sculpture is sympathetically shown, generally viewable in the round; photography, inthe form of Man Ray’s witty rayographs, Moholy-Nagy’s experimental photograms and Brassaï’s haunting images of Parisian graffiti, is given its due; while the depth of the design collection is amply demonstrated in rooms examining the history of the Bauhaus and of Groupe Espace. New acquisitions are shown off throughout, the most spectacular of which, Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated Maison tropicale, recently rescued from the Congo, has been reconstructed on thefifth-floor terrace (Fig.II). And, underpinning some of the pan-European dialogues set up in the main galleries, the interstices between them are filled with an eclectic, densely packed array of journals, reviews and manifestos, drawn from the extensive holdings of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, the Museum’s documentary library and archive, ranging from those whose striking designs and pioneering editorial content make them immediately familiar – De Stijl, Abstraction-Création – to those, such as the Polish journal Blok or the Hungarian socialist review MA, whose importance has not always been recognised.

Notwithstanding the admirable scope of this material, there is a blatantly Parisian bias in the Museum’s version of modernism’s progress, with Italian Futurism and German Expressionism both sidelined and only a token representation of Abstract Expressionism attempted, the one painting by Jackson Pollock squeezed into a survey of art informel. But it is on the fourth floor, which, in a deliberately more organic approach, continues the story from 1960 to the present day, that the most glaring gaps in the collection are exposed. Its central aisle, hung with large-scale works by many of the most prominent figures of the last four decades – De Kooning, Guston, Baselitz, Tàpies, Keifer and Richter among them – gives a convincing account of the variety and vitality of post-War painting; there are some exuberant displays of work by individual artists, including Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz and Pierre Huyghe, and movements such as Arte Povera (Fig.III) and Anti-Form; collaborations between artists, architects and designers are again emphasised, and further effective use of documentary material is made in a section outlining the history of the Galerie Iris Clert. The overall effect is, however, eccentrically lopsided. The first British artist to make an appearance is Francis Bacon, with a portrait from the early 1970s; American Pop art materialises only in a room conceived as a tribute to the late Pontus Hulten, the Museum’s first director after its move to Beaubourg; and Minimalism, despite the inclusion of notable pieces by Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin and Carl Andre, is inadequately defined. The French system of dation, by which donors are able to discharge significant tax liabilities in handing over works of art to the State, has enabled the Museum to greatly enrich its holdings in areas where French collecting is naturally strong. It is to be hoped that the newly reconstituted Centre Pompidou Foundation, the American supporters’ organisation which raises funds for acquisitions, will make one of its priorities the plugging of some of the more obvious holes in the Museum’s representation of American art.

The MNAM is, of course, only one constituent – if the most visible – of the Centre Pompidou, which is also home to the Institut de recherche et de coordination acoutique/musique and the Bibliothèque publique d’information, and which hosts an astonishing array of other cultural activities, organised by the Département du développement culturel. With the comprehensive revamp of the building at the turn of the millennium, during which its prematurely aged structure received a much-needed facelift, Library and Museum were both allocated extra room. Space for temporary exhibitions has also been extended. That the Pompidou is ableto mount up to thirty shows per year, ranging from blockbusters to collection-based displays, and from presentations by young artists in Espace 315 to ‘interventions’ by contemporary sculptors in the Atelier Brancusi, is testament to the energy of its curatorial staff. If, in recent years, these shows have perhaps not scaled the heights achieved in the early days at Beaubourg – for instance, in the great trilogy of exhibitions examining the influence of Paris on New York, Berlin and Moscow – they have nonetheless included some genuinely revelatory monographic shows (Picasso as sculptor, Miró, Yves Klein), several excellent historical retrospectives (Dada, post-War art in Los Angeles) and impressive exhibitionsby home-grown artists such as Sophie Calle and Annette Messager. The future programme includes an encyclopaedic survey of Futurism and, more ambitiously, an explorationof the spiritual quest in modern art.

Despite setbacks, the Pompidou is pressing ahead with plans to open satellite museums in France and abroad, about which reservations have previously been expressed in these pages. The first of its antennes is scheduled to open next year at Metz, the capital of the Lorraine région, close to the borders with Germany and Belgium. A more immediate project lies closer to home. In February the Pompidou received a surprise birthday present from the outgoing French president, Jacques Chirac. It has been given a suite of vast, empty galleries in the Palais de Tokyo, the original premises of the MNAM. Understandably, this has caused consternation at the Site de création contemporaine, which occupies one third of the west wing of the Palais, but which was not consulted about the plan. In its brief existence – founded on the initiative of the Ministry of Culture, it opened in 2002 – the Site has won a deserved reputation asa dynamic laboratory for emerging art and, naturally, it is anxious to retain its independence. Assurances, however, have been given that a takeover by the Pompidou is not intended. But whether the best use of this space is, as proposed, for exhibitions by established, living French artists is a moot point. Two new catalogues of the MNAM’s collection (reviewed on p.636 below) reveal that its holdings have swelled from some seventeen thousand works in 1977 toover sixty thousand today, of which less than five per centare currently on view, suggesting that a more pressing concern is to find a way of making available to the public a greater proportion of its hidden reserves. Sooner, rather than later, the Museum will outgrow its horribly cramped quarters. In the meantime, anyone seeking a refreshing antidote to the overblown thematic displays that have proliferated in museums of modern art in recent years need look no further than Beaubourg.