Musée National d'Art Moderne

When it opened in 1977, the Centre Pompidou shocked Paris: a building with its skeleton on the outside, its pipes and ducts painted blue, green and red, and its escalators climbing the front in a glass tube. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers had won the competition with a design that turned a museum inside out to leave the floors clear.

Inside those clear floors sits the Musee National d'Art Moderne, the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, with more than 100,000 works. It runs from Matisse and Picasso through Kandinsky, Leger and the Surrealists to the art of today, and it holds the reconstructed studio of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi in a pavilion outside.

A visitor should check ahead, though. In September 2025 the whole Pompidou closed for a five-year renovation, to strip asbestos and rebuild the interior, with reopening planned for 2030. During the works the collection is scattered, lent out to partner museums in France and abroad rather than shown on the Beaubourg plateau where the strange machine of a building still stands.