Pompidou's masterpieces move to Monaco ahead of closure for renovations

Many of the masterpieces in the Centre Pompidou 's permanent collection , which have already been evacuated from the Parisian museum ahead of its total closure for renovations starting September 22 , will spend this summer next to the Mediterranean in Monaco , displayed in an atypical exhibition that classifies them by color.

Titled Colours! Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou , the exhibition opened at the Forum Grimaldi in Monte Carlo until August 31. For the museum's curators in the French capital, it offers an opportunity to break with the canons and rules that normally govern the presentation of its extensive contemporary art collection.

It all stems from a rather exceptional "historical situation," notes Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the Pompidou and curator of the Monaco exhibition, since the five-year closure allows the works to be available to travel as a whole and be presented in a "spirit of invention."

"At the Centre Pompidou, as in all good modern art museums, the works are arranged chronologically by movement, one avant-garde movement following another, like pearls on a necklace. Here, however, we have the opportunity to do something completely different and group the works arbitrarily, for example, based on their color," Ottinger explains.

Displaying the works of Basquiat, Picasso, Miró, Matisse, Kandinsky, and others in this way allows us not only to rethink the relationships between them, but also to explore the effect that colors have on human perception, something that museums often give little thought to or even consider banal.

In fact, Ottinger could only find a couple of examples as precedents for this exhibition: one in Lyon (France) in 1988 and another at the MoMA in New York twenty years later.

"Grouping the works by color privileges their meaning and symbolism over their form. And that, of course, gives the works a freedom. It's as if we're freeing them from the chains of reason and historiography in which they've been somewhat domesticated and, at times, suffocated in the great museums of modern art," Ottinger reflects.

The stage design and the layout, given the inventive spirit of the exhibition, could not be orchestrated traditionally with rooms and corridors.

In the immense multipurpose space offered by the Grimaldi Forum ( about 2,000 square meters that are reserved for a different thematic exhibition each summer ), the works are organized like a chromatic circle that can be traversed in circles or going from its center outwards and vice versa.

Thinking about this arrangement for the Monaco event was, in fact, one of the catalysts for the successful exhibition for the centenary of the Surrealist manifesto (André Breton) that the Pompidou offered in 2024 and which was particularly surprising for its spiral construction.

In Monte Carlo, each section of the circle around which Colors! unfolds is dedicated to a different hue , with exemplary works from both the Pompidou's fine art collection and the Pompidou's design and decorative art collection.

The protagonists are blue , now the most widely accepted color worldwide, but once a symbol of barbarism; white , which can represent purity, but also mourning in other cultures; red , which emanates from war to passion; green and its evocation of the natural world; and pink , representing femininity, sensuality, and even frivolity.

The circle is completed by yellow , which has been the color of lies and betrayal in the West, while being reserved for emperors in China, and finally black , which denies all colors.

The journey through this tonal world is completed with small rooms where synaesthetic experiences are experienced : in them, color enters not only through the eyes, but also through the nose – imbued with perfumes that make one think of each specific tone – and through the ear, with music specially composed by the Chilean based in France, Roque Rivas.

The Pompidou exhibition in Monaco – which follows those dedicated to Turner and Monet by the Grimaldi Forum in recent summers – is part of the constellation of hundreds of activities that the museum has planned around the world while the renovations to the headquarters designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers last.

The goal is not only to keep them alive, but also to plan and rehearse new productions in preparation for the museum's reorganization when it reopens in 2030, if all goes according to plan.