The Pompidou Center prepares its landing in America. The Parisian museum, owner of the largest European collection of modern art, will open a new headquarters in Jersey City (New Jersey), a city located opposite New York, on the opposite bank of the Hudson River, in full population explosion for a few years. The center thus develops an internationalization strategy that has led it to open branches in Malaga (2015), Brussels (2018) and Shanghai (2019). This headquarters, the first that the Pompidou creates in the American continent, will occupy an old industrial building of 5,400 square meters that will be intervened by the OMA studio, headed by architect Rem Koolhaas. The opening of the space, which will be called Center Pompidou x Jersey City, is scheduled for early 2024.
The museum makes a surprising bet: to dispense with New York and establish itself in this city with an industrial past of 260,000 inhabitants, considered the most ethnically diverse town in the United States: only 20% of the population, according to the 2018 census, is “ non-Hispanic white ”.
"We had no interest in adding yet another art center to the landscape of Manhattan, where there is already a great offer," says the president of the Pompidou Center, Serge Lasvignes, who will publicly announce the project at a press conference called this afternoon.
Interior of the building where the Pompidou x Jersey City Center will be installed, in New Jersey City's Journal Square.
It was the local authorities, who aspire to reinforce the cultural offer of the city with new facilities, who contacted the Pompidou, selected among other potential partners for its multidisciplinary nature and for the cultural democratization programs for which it became known since its inauguration in 1977. “The Jersey City Council and the State of New Jersey came up with a proposal, which made us understand that we had much in common: a similar conception of cultural action and its social role, at a time when the The city is radically transformed and bourgeois, so social cohesion is of paramount importance ”, adds Lasvignes, who will leave office in the coming weeks, ending a term that began in 2015.
Jersey City has made available to the Pompidou a three-story brick building built in the early 1900s, which was originally the headquarters of the public electricity and gas company. The OMA agency will conduct a restoration that will preserve the building's historical elements, led by architect Jason Long, who previously designed the Faena Forum in Miami and the extension of the National Museum of Quebec (Canada). The psychological distance that separates New York from New Jersey, despite its geographical proximity, does not worry those responsible for the project, convinced that visitors will know how to overcome it. “Let's hope that the attractiveness of this changing city and the presence of the Pompidou constitute forces of attraction strong enough for tourists to come, as they used to go to Brooklyn,” Lasvignes responds.The location of this new headquarters, in the central and well-connected Journal Square, is another asset.
The 1912 building where the Center Pompidou x Jersey City will be installed, the former headquarters of an electrical company that later occupied a library and was annexed to a public university.
The agreement involves the temporary loan of works from its collection, the organization and curation of temporary exhibitions exclusively and the transfer of the Pompidou brand for five years, which can be extended, as is already the case in the other three antennas of the center outside France. The amount for which this agreement will be closed is in the process of negotiation and will be announced "before the end of the year," according to museum sources. In Shanghai, the agreement signed with the West Bund real estate group translates into about four million euros a year for the French museum. In Malaga, where the Pompidou Center has extended its presence until 2025, the City Council pays one million euros for the use of the brand and the collections and another million for transport costs.
The Pompidou is also studying establishing itself in Latin America. “The project is not buried. It is a very interesting possibility ”, says its president
Precisely, the headquarters in New Jersey will be “fully inspired” by the model created in Malaga in 2015. In other words, a “100% public” agreement between the French museum and the city of Jersey City. "Malaga allowed us to verify that the basic operating rules worked well," says Lasvignes. This will be the first American headquarters of the Pompidou, but it may not be the last: the French museum has been studying its implementation in Latin America for years. “The project is not buried at all. It is a very interesting possibility ”, confirms Lasvignes. In recent years, the Pompidou considered opening a headquarters in Colombia, which collapsed due to "the financial inability of the local partner to take on the project," and another in Mexico, where talks are "on hold" at the moment.The French museum is now studying "a third proposal" from another Latin American country, which Lasvignes calls "viable", without going into details.
Model of the OMA agency project for the Center Pompidou x Jersey City, to be led by the architect Jason Long.OMA
With this internationalization, the objective of the French museum is to make profitable its impressive collections (120,000 works, of which only 10% are exhibited in the rooms of its headquarters in Paris), which is an additional source of income in times of dwindling liquidity , but also increase your external influence and make your brand known abroad.
In 2019, only 40% of visitors to the Pompidou Center in Paris were foreigners, compared to almost 80% at the Louvre.
The visit to the modern art museum is usually reserved for a second or third visit to the city, unlike what happens with the art gallery that houses the
Mona Lisa
.
Museums that are exported
In the last decade, French museums have found in the opening of these offices abroad a considerable source of income, but also of
soft power
.
The most notorious case is that of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, inaugurated in 2017: the most visited museum in the world gave its name for the next 30 years in exchange for 400 million euros, added to another 400 for the loan of works from its collection and by the scientific curatorship of various exhibitions over the next decade.
The Picasso Museum in Paris and the Giacometti Foundation also finalize a joint project in Shanghai where works by both artists will be exhibited, while the Rodin Museum in the French capital signed an agreement in 2019 to create a center in the Chinese city of Shenzhen.
However, the most ambitious project will be the one promoted by Saudi Arabia, which aspires to use the cultural offer to improve its image and its geopolitical positioning. In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron, a firm supporter of "museum diplomacy", signed a cooperation agreement with the country for the tourist and cultural development of the Al Ula Valley, registered in the Unesco heritage, where they will be created. six new museums with the help of different French institutions.