Visiting the Centre Pompidou After Hours

In Ancient Greece, a mouseion was the temple of the Muses, the goddesses of inspiration. As long as I can remember, I have always felt inspired when visiting museums. They’ve often helped with writer’s block, reconnecting me with my creativity almost as soon as I entered any of the galleries of Paris’s famed institutions. I have spent many days and some evenings surrounded by beauty—but never a full night.

When I unexpectedly ran into Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon while covering the opening of a museum in Italy last year, I told him of a dream of mine: to explore the Centre Pompidou by night. He agreed at once, telling me the proposal was part of his vision to experiment with the museum and how it operates.

As the Pompidou team would later explain, the museum had never before granted another reporter this opportunity; TV and movie crews usually leave by 1 am when filming after hours. A cheffe du groupe de sûreté, or head security officer, named Francine, who is the only woman to have been appointed to this high-level position at the Centre Pompidou and whom everyone affectionately calls “Tinker Bell,” would accompany me for the duration of the stay, guiding me into any room of my choosing. (The blockbuster “Surrealism” exhibition, however, was off limits for insurance reasons.) Having worked at the museum for almost 20 years, Francine knows the building intimately.

I arrived at 8 pm sharp on a frigid Monday in early December. Francine met me at a back entrance, and we went to a multipurpose space on the 6th floor, where I remembered Art Basel Paris held its 2024 press conference, while we waited for the museum to close. This would be where I could rest. The Pompidou team had even left a sleeping bag on the couch for me, but I had already determined that I would not fall asleep that night. Afterall the 1977 Piano & Rogers–designed building measures 80,700 square feet across five floors—that’s a lot of ground to cover.

At 8:45 pm, a recorded voiceover announcing the museum’s closure in 15 minutes started the drawn-out evacuation of the galleries, and an hour later, a similar ritual occurs with the clearing of the third-floor Bibliothèque Publique d’Information, the famed public library. Regulars with nicknames like Barracuda, Jesus, Banana, or the Writer, tend to linger, the building being a second home to them. At 11:30 pm, the ground-floor Forum was finally empty. The lights went off, according to a timer, and Francine and I were alone at the Centre Pompidou, a prelude to its planned five-year closure this summer.

Just before midnight, Francine escorted me back to the fifth floor to meet French photographer Antoine d’Agata, a member of Magnum Photos since 2008 who is known for his images on addiction, prostitution, international conflicts. Le Bon had invited him to make Room 21B, a former screening room, his studio for almost five months. The framework of this unusual residency, titled “Méthode,” was meant to offer the artist a period of contemplation and fixedness, accessible to the public for the first time in his career. Along the gallery’s black-painted walls, d’Agata has installed a metal structure, filling it with photographs, cameras, and film rolls, as well as laying out all the proofs for a book of his work he is editing.

D’Agata explained that he opted for this residency, as opposed to a traditional exhibition because “I wanted a place to go through and store all my personal archive and belongings. … I had so many new ideas and so many unfinished projects trotting in my head that I felt trapped. I needed closure, to find some peace of mind and recover my freedom of movement.”

He added, “I am not even sure whether photography will be part of my future.”

After two hours of intense conversation, our paths parted at 2 am, when the museum’s rooftop Restaurant Georges closes, as d’Agata was not authorized to stay until morning. I then turned my attention to the Pompidou’s permanent collection galleries on the fifth and sixth floors, displaying about 2,000 pieces of its more than 140,000 works, the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, second only to that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Because the lights in the Forum went off at night, I expected the galleries to be completely dark and for Francine to have to turn them on individually; however, the lights at the Pompidou stay on in the galleries long after everyone’s gone.  

In the still of night, with no one and no sound around, I began to see the Pompidou’s treasured works anew. Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s explosively colorful abstract paintings had never appeared to me so clearly. I was drawn to a double-sided painting featuring an unfinished, yet captivating, self-portrait (of Robert), on one side and a hypnotic landscape on the other. I walked over an untitled 1962 painting by Karl Godeg, featuring a golden shape standing out against a dark background, like the moon in the night sky. The painting is among Godeg’s finest, coming right at the start of when he began using gold paint to depict anthropomorphic figures. Next, I headed to the Marc Chagall gallery, where I laid down right under Les mariés et la tour Eiffel (1938–39). Though I didn’t fall asleep, I felt like the newlyweds in the painting, flying over Paris on the back of an imposing white cockerel.

A gallery with crimson-painted walls then caught my eyes. During my visit, the intriguing space was home to “Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released,” an eight-venue exhibition across Paris for the monumental sculptures of Barbara Chase-Riboud. The combination of textile and bronze; rope and silk; black, red and gold in the five works on view gave me a thrill. It occurred to me that I hadn’t considered whether the Centre Pompidou might be haunted. “I don’t know about ghosts, but there is a definitely a presence,” Francine said, reminding me that the piazza below was once a cour des miracles (court of miracles), the Parisian slums of pre-modern Paris that served as the inspiration for Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.

At 3 am, we descended to “floor 21,” the museum’s second below-ground level, exploring the tunnels that connect the Pompidou with the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, a French institute devoted to the research of music and sound. (Piano & Rogers also designed this underground structure, on the south side of the piazza.) This secret tunnel isn’t normally accessible to the public and was fascinating to navigate.

At this point, it was time for a coffee break. As Francine and I chatted, a man suddenly stepped out of a room with a sleeping bag under his arm. (Researchers are allowed to pull all-nighters at IRCAM.) As we left, for fear of disturbing anyone else’s sleep, we noticed a woman was already sitting at the reception desk. It was almost 6 am!

Back inside the Centre Pompidou, we happened upon members of the cleaning staff who were already at work. They tried to teach me their special technique to dusting the floors efficiently—to no avail. Some were listening to the radio which made their routine look even more like a dance. Francine and I were waiting for restorers to arrive. Tuesday is the best day for them to go over the museum collections. They were a bit delayed, so I didn’t get to witness the conservation work. I wish I could have spent the entire day with them but, before I knew it, it was 10 am. The library was about to open, and the Centre Pompidou would welcome visitors in an hour, but it was time for me to go home.