Word: pompidou
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Most of the art is in storage on the floor above, accessible to scholars but not overcrowding the walls below. There is no sense of display, no anxious signaling about peak experiences. Piano's design eschews the high-tech theatrics that made such a mess of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he co- designed a decade ago. If ever one building in an architect's career made amends for another, it is this. Imagine something akin to the Frick Museum, but with fewer masterpieces and devoted to the juncture between modernism and the archaic, a place where disinterested aesthetic...
...attracting three-quarters of a million visitors annually to gaze at its superb Cezannes, Monets, Renoirs, Van Goghs and Lautrecs. There was a residue of 19th century work from Paris' former Musee National d'Art Moderne, whose 20th century collections had already been siphoned off into the Centre Pompidou. Major sculptures, including Rodin's original plasters, came from the Rodin museum in Paris; others were recovered from obscurity in warehouses where they had languished unseen since before World War II. Versailles, Fontainebleau, the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Museum of Ceramics at Sevres surrendered their treasures. Bequests given long...
...silence was occasionally broken by film units; Orson Welles and Bernardo Bertolucci are among the directors who have sought evocative locations in its Piranesian gloom. Meanwhile developers covetously eyed it, dreaming of the slow-motion arc of the wrecker's ball. In 1971 the French government, under President Georges Pompidou, issued a demolition order...
...French Presidents like to leave monuments behind them, preferably in Paris, as a proof of their passage. But no President de la Republique since World War II showed a more recklessly phara- onic commitment to changing the face of Paris than Pompidou. By a curious irony, the political consequences of this urge are what saved the Gare d'Orsay. Pompidou had ordered the razing and redevelopment of the vast central food market known as Les Halles -- Zola's "belly of Paris." The market, which had formed a bolus of stalled, honking traffic, was shifted to Rungis, near Orly Airport...
...Halles rallied the preservationists. The inadequacies of Beaubourg fed a mood of doubt about "radical" museum techniques. By the early '70s it was clear to the men of the Elysee that razing the Gare d'Orsay would be a major vote-losing blunder. The Gare d'Orsay stayed, Pompidou died, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the new President, inherited the problem...