Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project Shanghai
The unprecedented partnership between the Centre Pompidou and the Shanghai West Bund Development Group Co., Ltd is organized around several major lines of approach:
- lending works from the Centre Pompidou collections;
- designing exclusive exhibitions in resonance with the local cultural context;
- implementing the cultural programme and mediation activities;
- training museum professionals;
- presenting projects and exhibitions by Chinese artists in the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
The "Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project" was inaugurated in Shanghai on 6 November 2019, in the presence of Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic, and Franck Riester, Minister for Culture, for an initial period of five years. It was the most significant project for cultural exchange and cooperation between the two countries.
During its fist four years of operation, despite the difficulties causedy the global health issue that occurred shortly after the launch, it has emerged as a leading museum institution in Shanghai and China, praised by professionals and the public alike for its original contribution and quality.
Following this success, a contract renewing the partnership has been signed on 24 November 2023, for a further 5 years, with the aim of embracing a more expansive cultural perspective, deepening collaboration on various aspects, and jointly shaping new possibilities in the realm of arts and culture.
"The Shape of Time" (curator: Marcella Lista) is the first of the semi-permanent tours introducing the history of art in the 20th and 21st centuries that are due to be rolled out successively over the next five years.
Presented until May 2021, this first tour proposes to showcase major artists from the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne with the help of one hundred works and documents. Extending from the beginnings of modernity at the turn of the 20th century, which overturned the canons governing the aesthetics and even the very concept of art works, to contemporary artists' visions of the globalized world, it illustrates an intense dissemination of forms and ideas.
The second semi-permanent tour, "The Voice of Things", is on display from July 2021 to February 2023.
It brings together a collection of emblematic works, ranging from the avant-gardes of the early 20th century testifying to the revolution in aesthetic norms and the very status of the work of art, to the most recent artist creations that question our globalised world, and illustrates the importance of the object in the history of modernity.
"Mirrors of the Portrait. Highlights of the Centre Pompidou collection" is the third semi-permanent exhibition, on display from July 2023 to Nomvember 2024. Bringing together a selection of three hundred works from the Centre Pompidou collection dating from 1895 to the present day, this new presentation in fifteen sections highlights the multipleacets of the art of the portrait. A tour punctuated with many encounters, where famous figures and forgotten artists are presented side by side.
