The Centre Pompidou, Paris

Living in the Bohemia- central para of Lake Gardens, I was one of those Calcutta kids who devoured art books, especially books with reproductions of modern Western art. Till I was 15 and lucky enough to accompany my parents on a ‘world tour’ (comprising five countries in Europe and one United States) I had no real sense of what the paintings and sculptures actually looked like in a gallery — they spoke to me from the printed pages of the heavy books, the reproductions of the same work varying in colour and size from book to book. I still remember the thrill of first seeing a real Monet or a Picasso, of actually being able to walk around a Brancusi or a Moore. Since then, life has been exceedingly kind and I get a chance to make my pilgrimages regularly and, every now and then, to change and discard my gods at close quarters and to add new ones.

This Western summer I hit gold and managed to spend time in not one but three different museums of modern art: San Francisco MoMa, Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The SFMoMa was the smallest of the three, a compact building, with a recently added sculpture terrace. The Tate was familiar, but I was seeing it with a friend who was visiting for the first time. The Beaubourg, as the Centre Pompidou is also known, I just circled from the outside, deciding to give its innards a rest this time. When in Calcutta, I know many of us tend to think of these museums in a clump: an amalgamated mass of beautifully lit spaces containing a shifting cast of works, from the well-known to the not-yet-seen. Visiting these three spaces in a short span of time (thus reproducing for the first time a sense of my world tour of 1975) I realized the very different character of each museum.

While American artists were the ones who brought a much-needed wit and playfulness to an over-serious art world in the mid-20th century, the idea of the museum replacing the cathedral is now most apparent in a place such as SFMoMa. The galleries were full of schoolchildren but they were undoubtedly there for something solemn — many of them carried drawing pads and little note-books, copying an image or making a sketch of a sculpture. The notes on the wall betrayed no levity even when explaining the works of people like Robert Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol. One striking gallery had a good-bad-ugly face-off between three huge canvasses by the German artist, Anselm Kiefer, and his excavation of the themes of blood, earth and death in the German psyche felt as if they belonged here far more than the bright California sun outside. The new sculpture terrace was a slight relief but, even there, despite the smell of the freshly brewing coffee from the adjacent, open café, the wire mesh figure by Antony Gormley and the grand steel soaring of the Richard Serra recalled times and feelings that had nothing to do with sunlight or happiness.

On one floor of the SFMoMa, there was a conference of Calder mobiles with Japanese tourists worshipping them, their heads turned upwards under their ubiquitous digital cameras. I recalled seeing a couple of the works in the Centre Pompidou last year, when the Paris museum had a major Calder show. There, the air was far less serious, the atmosphere far more matter-of-fact and casual. The French love their art, their beauty and their modern design; they take them seriously but, in a sense, they also take them as a given, somewhat in the way people who own German cars take the famed machining and reliability for granted. The Calder show at the Pompidou was extensive but there were parts of it where you felt not enough care had been given to the display, the space wasn’t right for some of the works, the placement shoddy of the spotlights bringing out the shadows of some of the wire figures. Despite this, the substance of Calder’s light-hearted, light-handed playing came out far more strongly than while seeing some of his works in their permanent home in San Francisco.

The Pompidou and Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport are a study in contrast but they are also both very French 1970s. CDG was opened in 1975, Centre P in 1977 and each was regarded as a cutting-edge building when it was revealed to the world. CDG with its clear tubes of escalators was seen then as a space-age airport but very soon the heavy concrete slabs began to sag and chip and take on the scars of water-drips, exactly like that other Franco-Swiss master-cluster of buildings in Chandigarh; now the original terminals of the airport are almost obsolescent for a variety of reasons, and under constant repairs and upgrades. Centre Pompi on the other hand, has retained its magic despite some inevitable signs of wear and tear. There are two reasons for this. First, the building itself is a far more daring structure than the airport, with the Rogerses, Piano and their team’s crazy but brilliant idea of exposing all the pipes, colour-coding them and putting them on the outside of the building rather than hiding them in some concrete cladding; while the CDG airport was the end of a certain kind of architecture that had begun in the 1950s, Centre Pomp was the beginning of a building philosophy that still inspires and drives us today, 40 years after it was conceived. Second, the Beaubourg has a very different function from an airport, it’s a space for artists, crazies and quirkies, and a bit of wear and tear only gives it more shobha; over the years, the building and the ‘human area’ around it have meshed and the sloping square outside the museum has become a gathering space for musicians, jugglers and other performers; no matter what’s happening inside the musée, there is always a ticketless, highly varied arts show unfolding before the zany backdrop of the exterior escalators and brightly coloured pipes.

Approaching the Tate Modern on the Thames’s South Bank, you don’t, at first, see any connection with that classic 70s confection by Mr and Mrs Rogers and Renzo Piano, that is, until you take a proper look at the pedestrian bridges built across the Thames to celebrate the millennium. Looking at the two bridges that flank the bridge at the Royal Festival Hall, you first see the struts and cables as a clear nod to old Victorian bridges, you next see the exposed, beautiful workings as a meccano toy built by a very sophisticated child but also as a homage to the Beaubourg. It’s only after a while, or a few visits or if you’re at a particular second-floor balcony during the interval of a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, do you see that that the space-age, pointy bits of the support mimic the spires of the old buildings across the river, directly behind the bridges. Similarly, the walking bridge that makes a sweeping line from the Tate Modern across the river and straight towards St. Paul’s Cathedral also has a beautiful logic of its own: Tate Modern, rejuvenated 1930s brick pile — connected via a 21st-century bridge to Christopher Wren’s 17th-century landmark dome.

Coming last to the Tate Mo as I did, I could see the sum of architecture, museology and a chutzpah of urban-plannery, all coming together. Inside, an ongoing time-lapse documentation video of the new wing under construction was already available to viewers. In the top-angle shot, you could see small workers scurrying about, shifting massive slabs of concrete, connecting whole firnis of wiring, an idea taking shape to meld with a successful idea already in place. Inside, walking around with my friend who was discovering the place for the first time, I watched her face with interest as she took in the great Turbine Hall revealing itself as the escalator rose, I watched her as she spotted the tall slot window in one gallery that gave you almost a patua’s version of the pedestrian bridge and St. Paul’s and, when not looking at her, I watched the local schoolchildren who’d happily agreed to come here to have fun, who were subconsciously taking in and celebrating a magnificent public creativity as their birthright.