METZ – French president Nicolas Sarkozy has opened a spectacular new branch of the Pompidou Centre, France’s biggest art space, in the northeastern city of Metz, hoping to lure tourists to the struggling region.
The decision to bring works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Fernand Leger to an unglamorous fortress city in an area associated with heavy industry is aimed at balancing out Paris’s cultural dominance over provincial centres.
The new centre will draw on more than 65,000 works held by Musée National d’Art Moderne at the main Pompidou Centre in Paris, one of Europe’s largest collections of modern art.
“This museum, which is a strong cultural act, is at the same time an element of a strategic policy of economic development,” Mr Sarkozy said at the centre’s inauguration yesterday, adding: “Culture is a strategic element of France’s development.”
Seven years in the making and designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and French partner Jean de Gastines, the 10,700 sq m centre is based on the form of a Chinese straw hat.
A tent-like structure of wooden lattices covered by a vast protective membrane, the building is designed to hold live performances and multimedia shows as well as the outsized installations beloved of contemporary art.
Local authorities hope Metz will see an influx of visitors lured by the €70 million project in the same way that a branch of the Guggenheim museum has revitalised Bilbao in the Basque country in northern Spain since it opened in 1997.
“Lorraine has suffered a lot these past decades from restructurings, transformations and changes,” Mr Sarkozy said. “France believes in art and France believes that investing in a museum as extraordinary as this one is as important as investing in a university, in a laboratory, in nanotechnology.”
Run in conjunction with local authorities in Metz, the new centre’s inaugural show Masterpieces? is a collection of works which question what constitutes a masterpiece.
Paris’s famed Louvre museum will follow the Pompidou Centre into the provinces next year, when it opens a subsidiary in the northern French city of Lens in 2012. A Louvre subsidiary is also being built in the Gulf state of Abu Dhabi. – (Reuters)