A Museum of a Certain Age

It's all about floating, the Centre Pompidou - or, as everyone calls it in Paris, le Beaubourg. Whether you approach it uphill from the Seine or across the park which marks the site of the old market of Les Halles, the impression is always the same - a building, like the Taj Mahal or the Sydney Opera House, lighter than those around it: insubstantial, ready for flight.

Lightness has always fascinated Renzo Piano, who co-designed the building. He and Richard Rodgers flooded it with light, and with metaphors of floating and flying. The distinctive white-enameled cross-braced metal beams, for instance - these were inspired by the bones of the vulture's wing.

Up close, the sense of defying gravity doesn't fade. A web of scaffolding encloses a building so light that we could be staring up at the gas-filled sacs of a dirigible held inside their cable net. Transparent tubes snake along the outside, keeping it inflated. The 'air' they pump in is people, true, but that never makes it seem heavier, any more than a circus tent becomes more solid when it's filled with an audience.

The Beaubourg sits in the shallow dish of the Place de l'Horloge like a souffle on a plate. There are always a few mimes along the lip, playing to the crowds. This year, they're specialising in stillness; Egyptian statues wrapped in gold cloth, motionless Charlie Chaplins, unblinking shepherds powdered stone-white.

But when the Centre was new, the fashion was for figures forcing themselves, painfully, step-by-leaning- slow-motion step, into an imaginary torrent of air.

They too were picking up on the Beaubourg's illusion of lightness. It affects everyone - even more so since the renovations of last year, which demolished the partitioned office space inserted against the architects' wishes.

Now light passes unimpeded from wall to glass wall, illuminating... what?

Well, beautiful things, of course. All those massive canvases and sculptures that had so long crouched uncomfortably in conventional museums suddenly had room to stretch out. For the first time, one can step back from a Jackson Pollock and walk around a Dubuffet.

But it isn't I.M.Pei's monumental Washington gallery or Frank Gehry's Bilbao train wreck. Architecture and art move on; the Beaubourg remains moored to its site - less like an airship than the ocean liner with which Piano and Rodgers initially compared it.

When Georges Pompidou authorised this enormous building, the era of les grands travaux - monumental public works - was at its height. The Centre ate up one seventh of the annual national budget for culture.

Today, Pompidou's name is an insult. Claude Chabrol describes the setting of his classic suspense films like THE BUTCHER, THE BEAST MUST DIE and RED WEDDING as 'Pompidolien' France -- preoccupied with vulgar ostentation and petit bourgeois greed.

Some charge that the Centre Pompidou isn't so much a museum as a mausoleum. And certainly the enormous op.art. portrait of Pompidou's meaty mug that hangs over incoming crowds bears out that vision.

Mostly it jogs memories of the dying President's last months, carried like so much excess baggage from summit to summit, clinging to power while his architectural heritage was raced to completion.

The Beaubourg does have a place in the hearts of Parisians, but it's an ambiguous one, and constantly under review. If you like, she's the widow of the man who built her, kept attractive with the occasional discreet boob-job, face-lift and tummy-tuck, but now, as the French would say, a lady of a certain age. Growing old - gracefully, of course. But growing old just the same.

-- John Baxter