The Brooklyn Rail

The creativity of Laurent Le Bon is asymptotic to an infinite curve. No human being can claim to be infinite, but Laurent Le Bon comes close. An art historian by training, Le Bon served as Director of the Musée Picasso prior to his appointment as the President of the Centre Pompidou. In the conversation that follows, Le Bon discusses the importance of returning to the testimony of Brancusi, staying true to the mandates of the museum’s architects, and the Guggenheim as a pioneer of international satellite institutions.

Joachim Pissarro: I believe I am the only one at this table who was present when the Centre Pompidou came out of the ground in 1977. I was eighteen years old and living five blocks away. My parents had a house and a contemporary art gallery on Rue de Rivoli, and on the arcades. I was literally walking to the Centre. And for me, it was a miracle come true—the presence of this fascinating monster of all colors and shapes and totally new dimensions. I was studying philosophy and what drew me to the Centre every day was the library, which was a revolution of its own kind, because you were your own librarian.

At all these other traditional libraries you had to wait an hour or two—if you were lucky—to get your book. At the Centre you would just go around the shelves and help yourselves. What I’m getting at is that from its inception the Centre Pompidou was a revolutionary institution.

Laurent Le Bon: The idea is to keep the DNA of the Centre Pompidou of the seventies, and in the DNA you have the library—a place where everything is possible. Of course, the model of the library was the university library of America, and more precisely the one which was set up by the Americans in Berlin after the Second World War. That was one of the first libraries in Europe where you have the opportunity of taking your books freely.

When I think of our peer-institutions, let’s say, the Pinault collection, or the Louis Vuitton Foundation, or Cartier Foundation—what makes the Centre Pompidou different is the presence of the library. It’s the only library in France that stays open very late at night. There are no fees, and you don’t have to show an ID, which is very important because it’s the only place where people without official papers can come and access this knowledge. At the same time, as you were saying, people from the upper class also come. So it’s a very important place where you have this social mix.

Many people tell me we need more space for the collection, because in 1977 when the museum was founded the collection was around 10,000 works. Now it’s around 150,000 works. The collection spanned 1905–1977, and now it’s from 1905–2023, so fifty years more. Hence, we need more space. And I said, No, we don’t need more space. We need better space. Many of our colleagues around the world are thinking about this important question of sustainability. We don’t need more, we need better. And we need to come back to the beginning of the Centre Pompidou, which starts with the piazza. As you know, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers won the competition in 1971. They were the only ones who said, Well, we have a lot of ground, but we don’t want to use it entirely. We will use only half of the space. Why? Because, the outside public space is as important as the inside public space. They made the Rue Saint-Martin the first pedestrian street in Paris, and it was like a revelation.

And as you know, the piazza is a slope. The model was the Piazza Del Campo in Sienna, Italy. And very recently, I had a conversation with Sam Keller from the Beyeler, who told me there were two models for the Beyeler Foundation: the Menil Collection from Piano, and the Centre Pompidou. And if you remember, when you arrive at the Beyeler Foundation, there’s a slope. The garden and the idea of transparency come from the Pompidou. For 2030 we want a better library with a stronger relationship with the museum. Because my problem is, we have many very interesting things in the Centre Pompidou, but sometimes they don’t speak to each other. My job is trying to do a kind of coordination.

Pissarro: I discover new things about the Centre almost every time I come. But it is really an aggregate of different functions. Could you list them for us, so that we understand the range of what you try to bring together?

Le Bon: Yes, with pleasure. Sometimes people think that the Director of the Museum in the Centre Pompidou is the Director of the Centre Pompidou, but it’s a little bit more complicated. Inside the building, you have a free institution. You have the Centre Pompidou as a museum inside the Centre Pompidou as a building, and you have the Public Information Library, which we call the BPI— Bibliothèque d’Information Publique. We also have the Contemporary Music Institute, which was founded by Pierre Boulez. Inside the Centre Pompidou, there are twelve departments, and only one of them is the museum. So it’s interesting.

Pissarro: I didn’t know there were twelve.

Le Bon: Some of them are very common, like in all institutions, there are finances and things of that nature. Some are very precise. For example, one is called DCC, the Department of Culture and Creation. It’s the ancestor of the CCI, the Center of Industrial Creation (Centre de création industrielle), which was linked with design and things of that nature. Now they are more linked with the speech, conferences, dance, and other performances. At the beginning the Centre Pompidou was criticized as a monster, but very often it was called a supermarket of the culture. For Piano and Rogers, that was not a criticism. They were very happy, because in their mind, the model was the Fun Palace of Cedric Price. We have all the post-spirit of the year ’68. And of course, the idea of transparency and flexibility was very important. It needed to be somewhere where you could find whatever you wanted from different fields of the culture. In its early years, the Centre Pompidou had a post office, which at that time was important.

Jennifer Stockman: It’s fascinating to learn that the Pompidou Museum is a part of a much larger center comprising such an interesting mix of cultural organizations. Of course this implies that your responsibilities are even more extensive than we even imagined.

Le Bon: Yes, it’s like a village.

Stockman: How amazing to imagine Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, who were only in their thirties at the time, were able to see the future of culture as a supermarket. And I’m sure in your renovation plans, which I imagine are very grand, you are manifesting that dream even more. And maybe we can come back to that a little later, but first, I want to say: your reputation is that you work 24/7, and here we are, sitting in your office on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

Le Bon: I thank you so much for your words, but I think it’s not a job. It’s a passion. Especially when you are in charge of an institution that is open nearly seven days a week, and till late at night. One has to be here. If you are not present in your institution, it doesn’t work. That’s the way I see it. The job is so fantastic, but you have to be there, and you must be involved.

I take the short walk every day in the Centre Pompidou, and especially this week, I can feel how national our public is. It’s the difference between the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre and Versailles—they attract more visitors from abroad. Of course, we would be happy to have more people coming from abroad. But as you know, there is a huge question about carbon footprints. For a cultural institution, the main question is the geographic origin of your visitors. Our carbon footprint is smaller than the Louvre’s because we have mostly people from around the region. It’s very interesting because it’s more efficient to make loans to the Pompidou in Shanghai than to have people come from Shanghai to Paris.

Right now, in Paris, there is a debate about admission prices and the possibility of a higher price for foreign visitors. But I can feel in the air that the world of art is here, and I’m so happy that a small institution like the Pompidou is part of this larger ecosystem. And I have so many colleagues around and outside Europe, where the daily question is how to keep the doors open, how to give salaries to the team. In our country the Ministry of Culture is very present, but I don’t want to imply that we are very different from our American colleagues. We have to raise money also.

Stockman: The French government has always supported their arts infrastructure. In America, of course, that support doesn’t exist.

Le Bon: Tax deduction in America is a kind of public support.

Stockman: Fair enough, although French arts thrive on public funding, while US institutions rely on its private sector. But let’s return to something interesting you said earlier—that instead of bringing people here to see Matisse, let’s bring Matisse to the people. Let’s bring the Pompidou to the people. That really gets us into the question of your satellite museums.

Le Bon: Yes, and the Guggenheim has been a pioneer in terms of international action.

Stockman: Wow, that is quite a compliment to the Guggenheim and to the Director during that time, Tom Krens. I was actually President when the Guggenheim received so much bad press for branding the name and spending so much time creating satellites around the world. While it is true that several of our attempts never actualized for many complicated reasons, now many museums are looking to create what is commonly referred to as the “Bilbao effect.” Developing new museums is not easy to accomplish. However, all it takes is a few successful initiatives that truly resonate. In fact, I would like to compliment you and the Pompidou on your successes, and ask you to explain your unique strategy to create auxiliary Pompidous.

Le Bon: Well, we must return to the seventies when the Centre Pompidou, as Joachim said, was attacked, and the Minister of Culture of that time, Michel Guy, said, the Centre Pompidou is not a Parisian institution. It’s an institution for everyone. For example, in the first law for the Pompidou, there is an article that says the institution shall give advice to the regions, to the cities, things like that. So if you come back to this fifty years later, we are in this same period, but in a different way. We are in much more of a partnership.

But I want to say something to all of the people who thought that closing the Centre Pompidou in Paris would be a nightmare. Of course, it’s a difficult time. But one must consider the facts of the museum. We have 15,000 square meters. We can exhibit around 2,000 works, on average. The collection is 150,000. Every year we lend between 6,000 and 10,000 works. So the reality is that the Centre Pompidou already resides outside—

Stockman: —and is acting proactively, which is impressive.

Le Bon: I don’t want to overstate this, but I’m quite sure that we are the most important lender in the world.

Stockman: It is really great to hear that so many works from your collection are being loaned around the world.

Le Bon: That’s why we are building a new storage facility, which will be open partly to the public. It will essentially be a second Centre Pompidou, twenty-five minutes from here by tube. I will come back to that, but to respond to your question: we have two ways to make the collection alive, because, for me, a work of art in a storage room may be interesting for our children, but my job is to display the works.

And so that’s why the first Centre Pompidou partnership in 2010 was a very important moment. It’s a public institution, and we wanted it to be completely independent. It’s the opposite of the Tate. We don’t give advice or orders or programs to the directors of our satellite museums. Chiara Parisi is doing his own program. The same is true in Malaga, Shanghai, and very soon in Brussels and Seoul—and perhaps a little bit later, Jersey City. Contrary to what we read in the New York Times, the Centre Pompidou, Jersey City is not dead.

Stockman: What the Pompidou could do for New Jersey—for this entire region—is simply extraordinary. I personally hope the project happens, but no one has asked for my opinion. Does each one of these satellite organizations operate independently or do they report to you?

Le Bon: I think it’s very important that they have their own identity.

Stockman: What are they going to do about their own collections? Will they have their own acquisition budgets?

Le Bon: Some of them yes, and some of them do not. For example, Metz has no collection. Brussels will have one. Malaga has no collection; Shanghai has a small one. So it’s very different.

Stockman: I see.

Le Bon: If I can summarize, every new Pompidou has its own identity. We don’t want to have a standard, or any kind of command: you do that, you do that…

Stockman: Well, it’s interesting because the Guggenheim helped coin the term "starchitects," and everybody knows who those architects are. The Pompidou began its life as a major architectural landmark as well. Is showcasing the architecture, in addition to the art, something you also want to emphasize?

Le Bon: Sometimes it is important, like in Metz, where we have this nice building of Shigeru Ban who has been awarded a Pritzker Architecture Prize. But in Malaga, the building is less well known. It’s a building which was meant to be something else, and it was transformed. In Shanghai, the building was designed by British architect David Chipperfield on the Huangpu River. In Seoul, the building will be renovated by the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte. So again, it’s a difference with the Guggenheim policy. The architect we chose for the new Pompidou in 2030 is a team called Moreau Kusunoki. And Moeau Kusunoki was the one who won the Helsinki competition among—

Stockman: Yes. And another interesting connection between the Pompidou and the Guggenheim. I was disappointed that their Guggenheim project didn’t materialize in Helsinki.

Le Bon: They were sad, but they think that they won the Pompidou competition thanks to the Guggenheim competition.

Stockman: That is great too know and something to look forward to.

Le Bon: And they are not alone. They are with Frida Escobedo, the Mexican architect who was just appointed for the new wing of the Met.

Pissarro: Every time I speak to you, Laurent, or visit the Centre, I learn something new! One of the most beautiful exhibitions I have had the joy of seeing was the Brancusi exhibition that you, of course, take no credit for.

Stockman: It was an incredible show, one of the best ever.

Pissarro: And what did you do, Laurent? You stripped that building inside from the walls, because curators hate windows, since windows are a waste of real estate. Windows are made to be blocked so that you can put art on them. What you did with the sculpture facilitated things—you took them out—and suddenly the Centre became this sponge of light that let the city of Paris come in through the window and play this dance with Brancush. It was phenomenal. But I want to go from the sublime to something completely different.

I was on a road trip from Paris down to Barcelona with my wife, and we passed by a small town I never visited called Le Puy-en-Velay. And there, what do I see? This very beautiful, medieval, incredible town has partnered with the Pompidou. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Le Bon: Thank you, Joachim. That’s a very recent show, and it’s completely in the way we were talking before, about the relationship with our country and the fact that we are the most important lenders. It’s a show about the countryside as a place to live and work. The director of the museum came and said, “Can we do something together?” And we said, of course. And by the way, this was long before the new policy of the Ministry of Culture, who want to do many things with the countryside, but it’s in our DNA, and so, of course, it’s very important. At the same time in the region, we have something called the MUMO, museum mobile, which is something from the spirit of the sixties. It’s a truck, and we have part of the collection inside, and it goes from one village to another.

Stockman: How clever is that. Once again, you’re bringing art to the people!

Pissarro: You see what I mean? Every time I discover something new!

Le Bon: Let me come back to the Brancusi exhibition, because for me, it was very important. This is the first exhibition I was lucky enough to programme here. By the way, Joachim, you should say Brancusi. Like you, I always say Brancush, but that is the Romanian way to say it.

Pissarro: Oh, I see.

Le Bon: We always have this idea to nationalize his name. And so when I met the people who were in charge of the Brancusi estate the first time I said, “Ah, we are going to do a Brancush show!” And they were very upset. They said, “Laurent, if you want to do something with us, you have to say Brancusi.” And that’s very important.

Stockman: Why?

Le Bon: Because Brancusi, at the beginning of the twentieth century, left his country by foot, walking through Europe, through France, trying to make his art possible. And when he died, he said, I want to make a tribute to the country which was the only one to accept me, and that’s why we have the gift of the entire studio. And of course, I don’t want to make this political. I’m not a politician. But the fact that the first show I programmed was Brancusi was very important in the political context of the European elections. Another small thing: the Brancusi exhibition is very interesting in so far as how one can work with a collection. In the Pompidou, we don’t have a Mona Lisa. We don’t have Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Stockman: Right. And Museums think they need a unique attraction to bring in viewers. Is that true?

Le Bon: Our Mona Lisa, I think, is our building. It’s iconic. Some people hate it, some people love it, but it’s ours. And we have the Brancusi studio, but it was outside of the iconic building. On a good day, we have fifty visitors to that building. My only gesture was to say to the team, we must empty the studio and return to the testimony of Brancusi, who said, I want my studio to be inside the museum. But since 1957 when the museum was at the Palais de Tokyo, it was never completely displayed inside a museum.

Stockman: That was a very impactful exhibition. Was that your best show? Or your best attended show?

Le Bon: A good show for us is 6,000–7,000 attendees per day. We can’t do too much more because the space is too small. I think it is good when we have people—like you and Jennifer—who come to us and say, I loved the exhibition in Le Puy-en-Velay, and I loved the Brancusi show, et voila. At the same time, we have a comics show, and we are preparing a big show called “Paris Noir.” It will be a show about the relationship between America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe since the Second World war.

Pissarro: So Laurent, many people think the Pompidou is closing, but it is not. Tell us about this.

Le Bon: We are not dead! We are not closing! It’s a metamorphosis, because we will have shows at the Grand Palais and at Le Louvre while our building is closed for renovations. And our building is not closing until the end of 2025.

Stockman: People are very confused about it. And of course, the politicians in France are saying that it shouldn’t close at all. Will any of it stay open over the five-year period?

Le Bon: We launched a program called “Constellation.” It’s a tribute to Miró and many other artists who used this word for their works. But for us, this word is really the continuity of what we discussed, about Le Puy-en-Velay, about Metz, about Shanghai. I’m also sad that the building must close.

Stockman: But will the entire museum have to close completely?

Le Bon: When you have asbestos you can’t play with it, because it’s the life of people who are really involved.

Stockman: That’s indeed serious.

Le Bon: And if you don’t close the entire building, you will always have a problem. It’s easy when you are around the table with a glass of wine to say, ah, the Centre Pompidou must remain open, but the reality is that our building is in bad condition, and we need this technical upgrade. Starting from the basement, the parking for vehicles will be transformed all the way to the terrace on level seven, which was never opened to the public. Every floor will be transformed. And it’s exactly what Richard and Renzo wanted. They said, every floor, no pillars, no columns. Every ten years, every twenty years, you can change it like a supermarket. It’s more difficult than that, because you need money to make those changes. So we are still open. We are still alive. The iconic building will close in September 2025 after our last invitation to Wolfgang Tillmans.

Stockman: What an exciting last exhibition that will be.

Le Bon: He will be the first artist who will have an entire floor for himself. It’s a tribute to our friendship with Germany, and I think he will make a very interesting show about the relationship between the readable and the visible, between the library and the museum.

Pissarro: I did not know about this constellation theme, quoting Miro. But you know who else you are quoting? Thomas Krens. In 2000 I was Senior Curator at Yale and I organized a big symposium with all the top museum directors at the time. Krens came and basically his whole lecture was about the need to expand and create more auxiliaries throughout the world. And the concept that he was coming back with was—and Jennifer, you can expand on this—the notion of a constellation of Guggenheim museums.

Stockman: That’s true. He rightly thought the Guggenheim rotunda was too small, too limiting. So adding new locations was almost a necessity if you wanted to collect more art and show more than the permanent collection. I’m happy you brought that up about the Guggenheim, because it’s interesting to note how the world has changed in their response to museums. It gives the public more confidence about the quality of the Institutions when they see a recognizable name like the Pompidou or the Guggenheim or the Louvre in Abu Dhabi for example..

Pissarro: Jennifer and I were in London recently, and we spent time with Sean Scully. You’re unveiling a group of works by Scully. Could you tell us about that?

Le Bon: Scully has a very nice relationship with France and he wanted to make a gesture. It’s a fantastic gift, a fantastic donation, and it will make a large panorama of his artistic life, so we will display it. It’s important to have this wonderful gesture from Scully. If you remember, Picasso did the same in 1947 for the National Museum of Modern Art. He said, you have a collection, but you don’t have works by me, and so I will give you ten works I think for the French audience, it will be a real discovery in two ways: to learn about the evolution of this wonderful artist, and to know more about the relationship between Sean Scully and France.

Stockman: Is the Pompidou actively looking for donations of art?

Le Bon: Yes, because our budget is very small. We have two million euros to spend but last year acquisitions, including donations, came to around 200 million euros. This is especially thanks to donations, and thanks to the very specific law in our country called “Dation” which makes it possible to pay your taxes with works of art. It was an invention of André Malraux.

Pissarro: In British English, it’s called “donation in lieu of tax.”

Stockman: Yeah, and we’ve seen it in Korea as well recently. But Laurent, you’ve done how many shows in your career? Forty? Fifty shows?

Le Bon: It’s part of the job. Another thing I like about this job is the diversity. Even if it’s a small amount of time, I want to keep time to write, to do shows, and also to be a teacher. It’s very important for me to have this link with the younger generation.

Stockman: You’re obviously a very creative person, and to lose that because of your heavy workload, overseeing a major renovation, coordinating many partnerships that are borrowing works from your collection and managing all the satellites—it sounds like an enormous administrative job.

Le Bon: In France the administrative part is so small that it’s not a big job. [Laughter] I’m kidding.

Pissarro: You’re absolutely correct Jennnifer. Laurent, when I was your employee as a guest curator at the Centre at the Picasso Museum in 2017, we worked together on a show that was very meaningful to me, Olga Picasso, and at the same time you were working 24/7 on this project, you said to me, “Tomorrow, I have something to do with an exhibition at the Grand Palais.” I said, “What’s the exhibition about?” “Oh, it’s on gardens. I know you’re probably not interested in gardening.” You had been the guest co-curator of this magnificent exhibition, Jardins, covering virtually the entire footprint of the Grand Palais on the history of gardens in France from prior to Versailles to today!

Stockman: Beautiful. Laurent, you are a man of many talents. You know, we all are on journeys, and sometimes we don’t understand where they’re leading. But here you are in this very important job at a very important time in the Pompidou history. How do you think your past has prepared you?

Le Bon: I’m the first art historian to lead this institution since DominiqueBozo, thirty years ago. And I think, I don’t know if it’s a quality, but it makes the job a little bit different than my predecessors. It’s always a balance between the details and the overall strategy. If you are involved in every detail, it’s a nightmare. But if you are not involved in some details, you lose. And I think the small thing that perhaps I can add in this moment is experience. I was involved in launching the Centre Pompidou Metz.

Stockman: So you’ve already launched a Pompidou and clearly understand what it takes.

Le Bon: Yes. Now, I’m not specialized, but having worked at Pompidou Metz, Picasso Museum, Centre Pompidou—I’m always with a helmet and boots.