When I first saw the Pompidou Center in Paris years ago, I was stunned by its appearance. There were no dignified stone walls or colonnades that an art museum should have. Instead, pipes and steel frames were exposed bright red on the building's exterior, and a red escalator climbed through a glass tube, crossing the Paris sky. It looked like a factory or a dismantled machine.
But the moment I stepped inside, everything changed. Standing before Picasso's "Bust of a Woman," watching Kandinsky's abstractions vibrate before my eyes, feeling Matisse's colors spread through the air, I finally understood why this space is the sanctuary of modern art.
The Pompidou Center is not merely a museum. In 1969, French President Georges Pompidou made the decision to build an unprecedented cultural space in the rundown Beaubourg area of central Paris. He believed that "a museum should be a plaza for citizens." Designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the building opened in 1977, three years after President Pompidou's death in office.
He did not live to see its completion, but his legacy transformed Paris. If the Louvre is a temple preserving the past, the Pompidou, which holds 120,000 works in its collection, is a plaza that breathes life into the present. The space stands as a complete testament to how 20th-century art — through Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse, Chagall, Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Francis Bacon — changed the way the world sees.
Now that Pompidou Center is taking up residence in Seoul's 63 Building in Yeouido. "Pompidou Center Hanwha" will open on June 4. Following Malaga and Shanghai, it is the third private partnership cooperation model, with the Hanwha Culture Foundation as the operating entity in long-term collaboration with the Pompidou Center.
The opening exhibition, "Cubists: Innovators of Vision," lives up to the excitement. Ninety-one works by 43 artists, including Picasso, Braque, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and Robert Delaunay, are coming to Seoul. Cubism, which broke down and reassembled objects from multiple perspectives, was not merely a style but an event that overturned the very way of seeing the world. Twenty-one works by 11 Korean modern and contemporary artists, including Kim Whanki, Yoo Young-kuk, Park Rae-hyun, and Lee Soo-eok, will be displayed alongside, showing how Western art movements lived and breathed within us. This is not a passive exhibition that imports and showcases French art, but rather reflects a determination to confidently incorporate Korea's narrative into world art history.
But once the excitement subsides, cold numbers await. The Hanwha Culture Foundation has secured four years of operating rights, bearing more than 7 billion won annually in brand royalties, work loan fees, and consulting costs. It is no light sum for borrowing the Pompidou name.
Precedents offer both hope and warning. The Malaga branch attracted 200,000 visitors in its first year and surpassed a cumulative 3 million visitors, succeeding in signing a 10-year extension contract through 2034. Shanghai's West Bund has continued its partnership since 2019, establishing itself as a hub of the Chinese contemporary art market. By contrast, Jersey City in the United States faced massive fiscal deficits and announced the suspension of cooperation early this year.
Where will Seoul stand? Malaga's success was possible because it was deeply combined with the regional identity of being Picasso's hometown, while Jersey City's failure was largely due to the city's fiscal deficit. Busan is now also pursuing the bid for a Pompidou branch. If combined with the unique story of the port city of Busan, another possibility could open. The Pompidou Center entering Seoul stands at its first test of whether it will become a stepping stone for Korean art's leap to the center of the world.
