Serge Lasvignes, the head of the Pompidou Centre, will attend the Reframing Modernism exhibition in Singapore, which will include works from Asian artists alongside loans of European Modernist works from the Pompidou © Thibaut Chapotot
After exhibitions this spring in Singapore and Japan, the Centre Pompidou in Paris will open a temporary exhibition space in Seoul next year, and another in China in 2018.
The new centres are being branded Centre Pompidou followed by the name of the host city (they were originally called Pop-Up Pompidou). The first of these new spaces, Centre Pompidou Malaga, attracted 200,000 visitors in its first year, fr om March 2015 to March 2016. According to a senior source at the Pompidou, Malaga “served as a laboratory for future experiments elsewh ere in the world”.
A branch of the Centre Pompidou opened in Málaga, Spain in 2015
With fewer than 600,000 inhabitants, the southern Spanish city is not on the same scale as Asia’s megalopolises, but it has proved a useful showcase. A South Korean delegation has visited, and the Chinese are expected to follow.
The new Pompidou centres are conceived as miniature versions of the 40-year-old Paris institution, and their target locations are new or temporary facilities. Our source tells us: “Pompidou Centre is now a global trademark. The museum is ready to export all its activities: not only its works of art and temporary exhibitions, but also cinema programmes, concerts, dance and other performances, activities for teenagers and workshops for children, and so on. No one in the world has such a complete package to offer.”
The Paris museum charges an annual fee of around €1.5m for its services. Malaga was able to borrow around 100 works to create the main exhibition, and will also host two or three temporary shows each year, along with a range of other activities. All costs are borne by local partners, and contracts run for five years.
The extra money is welcome for an institution that has lost 9% of its overall budget because of government cuts, but what is also crucial is “to involve local artists so it can meet the creation from the emerging continents and enrich its own collection with their output”.
The Pompidou declined to discuss the South Korean or Chinese projects further. It has not forgotten the embarrassment that followed the premature announcement by the French culture ministry of a similar outpost project in Shanghai in 2007, which annoyed the Chinese government; the deal subsequently fell apart. But talks are at an advanced stage and Centre Pompidou Seoul should open in the first half of 2017. Although it is a private initiative, the matter was discussed by the French government and the president, François Hollande, during his visit to South Korea last November, when he was accompanied by Serge Lasvignes, the head of the Pompidou.
The French intend to develop specific themes for the host countries. In Malaga, which is Picasso’s birthplace and already has a museum dedicated to him, the artist’s work is at the core of the permanent exhibition. Lasvignes will celebrate his first year in post at the opening on 31 March of the first temporary exhibition at the new National Gallery Singapore, which juxtaposes works from Paris with Modern art from the region (see box). Next June, a spectacular show devoted to Modernist works from 1906 to 1977 is scheduled for Tokyo, wh ere the curator Laurent Le Bon, who heads the Picasso Museum in Paris, intends to choose 72 masterpieces from the Pompidou’s collection, each one symbolising a particular year.
After South Korea, the next big “export” product will be another five-year centre in China, which might open in 2018. Discussions are at an advanced stage and several locations in Shanghai are being explored. The possibility of a new building may even be on the table.
Pompidou and Singapore revise history of Modernism
Impression V (Parc) by Kandinsky, one of the artists whose work is explored at Reframing Modernism. Photo © CNAC/MNAM Dist. RMN - B. Prevost
Curators from the Pompidou in Paris and the new National Gallery Singapore have co-organised an exhibition that aims to expand the history of Modern art to include artists from Southeast Asia, such as H.R. Ocampo, Georgette Chen, Affandi, Latiff Mohidin and Le Pho, alongside their European contemporaries Picasso, Kandinsky, Chagall, Matisse, Léger and Braque. The exhibition, Reframing Modernism, was due to open in Singapore on 31 March (as we went to press), and includes around 250 works by 48 artists. Loans from the Pompidou make up half of the show; the rest of the works come from Singapore’s national art collection, along with loans from public and private collections across the region. This is the second exhibition to come to Singapore on loan from the Pompidou. In 2011, the Singapore Art Museum hosted a show of videos from the French institution.
