PARIS.- The Centre Pompidou added 3,060 works by 230 artists to the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne in 2025, continuing an ambitious acquisitions program even as its historic Paris building entered a period of major renovation.

The acquisitions range from landmark works of postwar European art to experimental film, photography, design, comics, street art and projects involving artificial intelligence. Together, they show an institution attempting to broaden the conventional story of modernism while preparing for the enormous practical challenge of caring for a collection that now approaches 150,000 works.

When the Centre Pompidou opened in 1977, the Musée national d’art moderne held approximately 17,000 objects. Nearly half a century later, the museum describes its holdings as the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe.

The scale of the 2025 intake is striking, although the figure is partly explained by several unusually large groups and archival ensembles. The most important is Claude Rutault’s Transit, a conceptual work from 1983 comprising approximately 1,700 painted canvases.

Rutault designed Transit according to a protocol that allows the work to be continually “updated,” with decisions delegated to those responsible for each new presentation. Its evolving stock of canvases can also be used in the realization of other works by the artist. By entering a national collection through France’s tax-payment-in-art system, the work gains a permanent institutional framework for its preservation and future activation.

The acquisition has particular resonance for the Centre Pompidou. Rutault conceived Transit after participating in the museum’s 1983 exhibition “Bonjour Monsieur Manet!” Before the dation, the Centre held nine works by the artist, a central figure in French conceptual painting.

A second dation brought four paintings by Jean Le Moal into the collection, including La Paix malade from 1936 and La Femme au lampion from 1945. The works expand the museum’s representation of the artist’s progression from figurative interiors and landscapes toward a lyrical abstraction inspired by the natural world.

Gifts reshape the collection

Although the Centre Pompidou had an acquisitions budget of €1.8 million in 2025, many of the year’s most significant additions arrived through gifts, donations and philanthropic support.

Francis Alÿs donated 22 videos from his long-running “Children’s Games” series, which records forms of play in public spaces around the world, along with two additional videos. The gift builds on an earlier donation and substantially strengthens the museum’s already extensive holdings of his work.

The Centre also received 11 computer-generated works on paper by Vera Molnar, dating from 1975 to 1990. Produced with plotter printers, the drawings deepen the museum’s account of a pioneering artist who explored the creative possibilities of algorithms decades before digital art entered the mainstream.





A major group from the estate of Tony Morgan — 12 installations, 36 films and 15 videos — establishes the Centre Pompidou as a reference collection for an artist whose work in performance and moving image remains comparatively little known.

Urban art was another priority. The museum acquired 14 stencil matrices by Miss.Tic and purchased three of her works, significantly expanding its representation of the Paris street artist known for combining female figures with sharply worded, poetic texts. The group forms part of a wider effort to bring art forms once considered peripheral — including street art and comics — into the national collection.

That commitment is also reflected in the acquisition of original pages from Claire Bretécher’s “Agrippine” series and works by the collective VLP, or Vive La Peinture, whose vividly colored paintings emerged from the punk-influenced culture of Paris in the 1980s.

Other notable gifts include five sculptural works by Antoni Clavé, 50 photographs associated with Charlotte Perriand’s practice in the 1930s, and Ron Amir’s photographic series documenting refugees detained at the now-closed Holot facility in Israel’s Negev desert.

From artificial intelligence to historic film

Among the works purchased in 2025 is Éric Baudelaire’s En attendant le récit/Tales of Narrativelessness, an installation in which three synthetic voices use artificial intelligence to conduct a real-time discussion about truth, the collapse of shared narratives and the role of art.

Its acquisition reflects the museum’s stated intention to collect works responding to technological change, including artificial intelligence and NFTs, rather than treating digital culture as separate from the history of modern art.

The museum also acquired Bertille Bak’s Mineur, Mineur, which addresses child exploitation through a deceptively playful visual language, and Laura Henno’s Ge Ouryao! (Pourquoi t’as peur!), centered on young migrants living clandestinely in Mayotte.

A rare historical acquisition is Europa, the 1931 avant-garde film by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. Based on Anatol Stern’s 1925 poem, the film translates its anger and political urgency into fragmented imagery, caricature and dissonant rhythms. The work was regarded as one of the most important films of the Polish avant-garde.

In sculpture, Germaine Richier’s late polychrome work Le chardon peint brings together several of the artist’s defining concerns: the hybridization of the human and vegetal, experimentation with color and materials, and the relationship between sculpture and surrounding space.

The museum also strengthened its holdings of artists historically underrepresented in French public collections. These include Roseman Robinot, acquired through a fund connected with the exhibition “Paris noir,” and Nazanin Pouyandeh, whose 2017 self-portrait Créole entered a French public collection for the first time.

Philanthropy as an acquisitions engine

The report makes clear that the Friends of the Centre Pompidou have become indispensable to the museum’s collecting strategy. The organization supports more than 200 acquisitions each year and is responsible for approximately 80 percent of the museum’s contemporary acquisitions.

Its geographic committees helped bring in works by artists including Ed Clark, Cheick Diallo, Monica Mayer, I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, Everlyn Nicodemus, Nena Saguil, Hassan Sharif, Wolfgang Tillmans and Martha Wilson.

The acquisitions reveal a deliberate movement beyond the traditionally dominant art histories of Western Europe and North America. The Centre has developed dedicated groups focusing on regions including Latin America, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East and North Africa.

Chinese contemporary art received particular attention through a new three-year acquisition and research fund established with Chanel. The initiative places special emphasis on women artists and follows earlier support for the exhibition “China, a New Generation of Artists” and the acquisition of 21 works by emerging Chinese artists in 2024.

The collection’s expansion comes as construction advances on the Centre Pompidou Francilien–fabrique de l’art in Massy. Scheduled to open to the public in early 2027, the 30,000-square-meter complex is intended to bring the museum’s approximately 150,000 works together under optimized conservation conditions for the first time.

More than a storage facility, the new center will include advanced restoration workshops, research spaces and public programs. As the Paris landmark undergoes renovation, the Massy project represents a new center of gravity for a collection whose continued growth has become both one of the Pompidou’s greatest achievements and one of its most demanding responsibilities.