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Circus or Art Museum?

The Pompidou Center in Paris, Photo by cuellar, courtesy Flickr

Paris, FR – Forget the lions, tigers and bears. Paris’ Pompidou Center plans to fill a colorful circus big top with Picassos, Matisses and Calders instead, creating a roving museum to take its masterpieces of modern art to France’s culturally deprived rural regions and rough suburbs.

The so-called “Pompidou Mobile” aims to be just as avant-garde in its design as the original Pompidou Center – the audacious, tube-covered structure that houses the city’s premier contemporary art museum and caused a furor when it opened in 1977.

Only part of the necessary funding has been raised and no itinerary has yet been drawn up. Visiting the roving Pompidou will be free, and the project’s priorities are rural regions and the poor, crime-ridden suburbs that ring France’s cities but are often largely cut off from the cultural offerings there.

“It’s about bringing art to the people to awaken their desire to go toward the art,” the Pompidou’s president, Alain Seban, said in a statement. “It’s a sign of our openness.”

Architect Patrick Bouchain, whose firm specializes in circus tents and other collapsable structures, showed sketches of his design for the new Pompidou structure at a presentation Thursday: several triangle-shaped modules that can be fitted together to create different structures fitted to the different environments in which the museum will pitch its tent.