PARIS.- The century-old Pathside Building in downtown Jersey City, New Jersey, was originally a transportation hub for streetcar lines, but it took on a new role three years ago: It became the chosen destination for an outpost of the Pompidou Center, the Paris arts complex.

In a June 2021 video news conference, the mayor of Jersey City, Steven Fulop, announced the Pompidou Jersey City project, a 58,000-square-foot future museum with full access to the Pompidou collection, Europe’s largest for modern and contemporary art.

“Partnerships like this aren’t easy to obtain, and the Pompidou could have chosen any city in the country,” Fulop said at the time. “We are making a bet, and a big bet, that arts is part of what makes a city a great place to live.”

Today, all bets are off. The New Jersey state Legislature rescinded $24 million in funding for the satellite Pompidou museum in June, and officials paused the project indefinitely, saying they wanted to avoid saddling taxpayers with an expensive venture.

For the Pompidou Center, the postponement of the outpost means an immediate budgetary shortfall. The Pompidou, which opened in 1977, is a Paris landmark with a reputation for high-caliber exhibitions. It gets two-thirds of its annual budget from the French government — down from 90% when it first opened. It has to raise the rest, about $45 million a year, through ticket sales and international projects.

The institution now has an additional fundraising mission: to help pay for a $500 million redevelopment of its Paris flagship, which will close for refurbishment from late 2025 to 2030. The French government is covering more than half the bill — for an initial technical phase of repairs to the facade and the physical infrastructure — but is providing no extra funding for the next phase, a revamp of the building interior.

The Pompidou’s international satellites can be a key funding source for that. Operating like franchises, Pompidou pop-ups buy the right to use the center’s name for a five-year (renewable) period, and in exchange, receive collection displays and exhibitions organized by the center, as well as institutional expertise.

Pompidou Málaga, in Spain, opened in 2015 and satellites in Brussels and Seoul, South Korea, are set to open next year.

Each outpost pays a few million dollars a year to the Pompidou in Paris — so the derailing of the New Jersey deal is a setback. It has been contributing between $1.5 million and $2 million a year to the Pompidou, in the run-up to the museum’s opening, according to France’s national audit office.

The audit office and others have voiced concerns that the Pompidou’s international business model doesn’t generate enough money and that overseas ventures are distracting the Pompidou from its core duties: curating outstanding cultural programs, and caring for the 120,000 works in its collection.

In an interview at his office next to the center, the Pompidou’s president, Laurent Le Bon, defended the strategy.

“The reality of the Pompidou Center is that it’s no longer just a Parisian institution,” he said. “In today’s world, we can no longer have a museum that’s inward-looking, that isn’t inclusive, global and diversified.”

Noting that host cities “come to us” and that the Pompidou was “not going door-to-door,” he said the global outposts allowed the center to fund projects such as the Paris revamp, and “to disseminate our collection, disseminate what is our DNA.”

Towering over Paris like a rainbow-colored refinery, the center was conceived by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with an inside-out design: column-free spaces inside, and pipes on the outside, containing the building’s structural elements.

Yet the maintenance-heavy edifice is tired and badly needs the planned technical overhaul, which will involve repairs to the famous exterior; asbestos removal; and work on energy efficiency, fire safety and building security upgrades. A 1997-2000 refurbishment — to renovate the facade and the caterpillarlike external escalator and move offices next door for extra gallery space — was insufficient.

“If we don’t take immediate measures, the building will collapse: There are pieces of metal falling off of it every day,” Le Bon said.

Once the technical overhaul is complete, an architectural reconfiguration of the interior spaces is planned. “These are essentially internal modifications that make no changes to the large structure that is the Pompidou, which continues to be this wild animal in the heart of Paris,” said Piano, the building’s co-architect.

The architectural team — led by Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki — plans to streamline the foyer to make it more visitor friendly, expand the public library housed inside the Pompidou, and turn an underground parking lot into additional exhibition galleries, movie theaters and auditoriums.

That depends on the Pompidou raising about $200 million, which Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called “an enormous challenge” that “puts a lot of stress and strain on the institution.” But, he added, Le Bon “knows what he’s doing.”

Lowry noted that the Pompidou’s international strategy had benefits and hazards.

“The risk for the Pompidou is that these multiple responsibilities dilute their capacity to produce an outstanding program in Paris,” he said. “The reward is that they can create a network of institutions in critical locations to work with that can amplify their presence around the world.”

One such location is Brussels, where, in December 2025, Kanal-Center Pompidou is set to open inside a 420,000-square-foot former Citroën garage, giving the Belgian capital the major modern and contemporary art museum that it lacks.

The Brussels region reached out to the Pompidou about a decade ago “to benefit from the Center’s significant expertise in museum creation,” said Yves Goldstein, the Kanal-Center Pompidou’s director. The partnership, which runs until 2030, will cost Brussels about $14 million overall — “a fair price, given how much other museums are charged for a single touring exhibition,” he said.

The Málaga outpost seems to have pleased officials there, who recently extended the partnership for another 10 years. The seafront satellite has a multicolored, cube-shaped facade, and subterranean galleries that have shown some 20 Pompidou exhibitions and six collection displays since 2015.

Opening at roughly the same time as Brussels is the Center Pompidou Hanwha-Seoul museum. It will be situated inside the 63 Building skyscraper in Seoul’s business district, and offer eight Pompidou exhibitions over a four-year period.

A deal with Saudi Arabia is of a different type: Signed in 2023, it involves the Pompidou playing more of an advisory role for a planned contemporary art institution on the Al Ula heritage site. A similar agreement was signed by the Pompidou with the state of Paraná in Brazil in 2022.

The Pompidou has been criticized for spending too much time and human resources on these projects relative to their financial returns. A report from the Cour des Comptes, which audits state spending in France, said that the Pompidou netted about $22 million from 2014 to 2022 from its partnerships in Málaga and Brussels, and from a deal with the West Bund Museum in Shanghai to present exhibitions and displays there.

While these international ventures are “still in an experimental phase,” they have “taken a very important place in the Centre Pompidou’s economic model,” which is “difficult to sustain,” the report said. It urged the center to drum up more sponsorship, noting that the Pompidou had generated about $38 million in cash sponsorships (as opposed to donations for acquisitions) from 2016 to 2022.

One high-profile sponsorship came up during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, when Nike covered the building’s main facade — except the escalator — with a promotional video screen, and staged an exhibition inside on the Nike Air Max 1 sneaker (which was originally inspired by the Pompidou architecture).

Artist Christian Marclay, who recently had a solo show at the Pompidou in Paris, said that he loved the end result, but that he “had to do some fundraising myself.” He said he helped secure sponsorship for the exhibition from Snapchat and from a Swiss private bank.

The French government funds cultural institutions substantially, Marclay added, so “the idea of asking for money” is “not something they like to do.”

State support for the Pompidou was not substantial enough, said Catherine Grenier, a former senior official at the museum who now runs the Giacometti Foundation in Paris. She argued that the government should shoulder the full $500 million revamp cost, noting that the Pompidou “pulls in extremely significant national and international visitors.”

The prospect of shuttering such an important drawing card for nearly five years worries some figures in the Paris art world, who fear it could damage the city’s international standing. “Closing the Pompidou Center is a mistake” and “a cultural waste,” wrote art dealer Daniel Templon in an editorial in the newspaper Le Monde this year, “when the whole world considers Paris to have regained its status as Europe’s contemporary art capital.”

Philippe Mahé, a Pompidou security team manager and labor union representative on the center’s board, said it was “possible to refurbish the Pompidou section by section” and keep it partly open if Le Bon abandoned the plan for the interior redesign, which requires “heavy building works.”

The center’s staff members — who were on strike for more than three months before being assured that their jobs were secure until 2030 — are still worried about its future, Mahé said.

Either way, the interior refit would go ahead, Le Bon said, adding that he had raised about nearly half of the $200 million required, though he gave no breakdown. The Cour des Comptes report said the Pompidou had raised about $43 million of the total from fees for the planned Seoul outpost, and by allocating an existing government grant for a revamp of the Pompidou’s library toward the refit. Elsewhere, the report listed the fees expected this year from Málaga ($2 million), Shanghai ($3.85 million) and Brussels ($1.4 million); between now and 2030, satellites will also contribute toward the redesign.

“In September 2025, we will close our doors to the public, look at where we are, and decide what to do,” he said, noting that the interior work was split up in segments which, if unfunded, could be dropped.

“Maybe we’ll have good news, maybe we’ll have bad news,” he said. “We’ll make do with whatever money we have.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.