Pompidou Center

Pompidou Center (Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou or Centre Pompidou in French), arts complex in Paris, established on the initiative of former French president Georges Pompidou. The Pompidou Center building, situated on the Rue Beaubourg, in the Marais district of Paris, is a celebrated yet controversial modernist structure in steel and glass designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano and British architect Richard Rogers. It was completed in 1977 and soon became well known for its exposed pipes, ducts, and other utilities, which are painted in bright colors to identify their respective functions.

The Centre Pompidou houses the National Museum of Modern Art, whose collections are representative of several important 20th-century movements, notably fauvism, cubism, and surrealism, with a particular emphasis on French art. The collections include works by Henri Matisse, André Derain, and other fauvist painters; Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and other cubists; a strong corpus of surrealist paintings; and works by Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, and Constantin Brancusi. Later artists represented include Nicolas de Staël, Jean Dubuffet, and Franz Kline, and American abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg.

The Centre Pompidou also houses a large public reference library, a center for industrial design, and a center for electronic music, ERCAM, associated with the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, and equipped with a concert hall dedicated primarily to modern music.