Pompidou Mobile

Aubagne is already Provence even though it does not yet have that scent of lavender and characteristic atmosphere made famous by paintings by Cézanne and Van Gogh. It is in this town – between Marseille and Aix en Provence – that the Mobile Pompidou Centre is appearing for three months, as part of Marseille European Capital of Culture 2013.

We move down the roads following the red and yellow signs displaying the symbol of the renowned Paris arts centre until we reach an area with three marquees. We find ourselves before a kind of circus designed by architect and competition-winner Patrick Bouchain, that consists of three structures each extending over 200 mq, made from metal beams and conceived as coloured tents in orange, red and blue.

I won’t go into the architecture that – with its altogether French emphasis – has been compared to the radical utopias of Archigram, the architectural outcome of which could have been less predictable if we think of the Metz Pompidou by Shigeru Ban. Nonetheless, in a historic dimension that conjures up the pavilion of the exhibition of the fascist Revolution designed by Libera and De Renzi (it is not by chance that it was backed by the Sarkozy right wing), that spread political ideas through art, the Pompidou Mobile arose from the necessity to underline the principle of culture for everyone. A principle borne out by the survey by TNS Sofres who identify the majority of the visitors to be office workers and employed people, in other words the middle-classes. It is a shame that after the Aubagne exhibition, the tour will end due to lack of funding. As Florence Evin wrote in Le Monde, the estimated cost of each stop – that includes insurance, security, putting up and taking down the structure and transport – went from 400,000 to 600,000 euro, coinciding with a reduction in funding from the state that in 2011 had allocated 1.5 million euro of the total cost of 2 million for building. All this, together with loss of support from sponsors (Fondazione Total, GDF Suez, Galeries Lafayette, La Parisienne insurance) has meant the end of an intelligent project.

The project emerged from an idea of Alain Sebain, president of the Pompidou centre since 2007, whose aim was to bring culture to the places it wasn’t reaching. Starting in Chaumont in 2011, the Mobile Pompidou then moved on to the cities of Cambrai, Boulogne-sur-mer, Libourne and Le Havre with the intention of presenting fifteen original works from the museum collections as well as establishing a dialogue with works by artists from the host area. The statistics are impressive: 200,000 visitors with a high number of school-age children demonstrating how important it is for new generations to come into contact with “anomalous” places like museums. Free entry and the Pompidou name also served to arouse the curiosity of the masses, particularly those unaccustomed to culture.

Establishing a direct relationship with works by Marcel Duchamp, Max Bill, Daniel Buren or Victor Vasarely in the context of suburban France has a deep political significance that goes well beyond party alliances. Conceived above all for a younger public, the Mobile Pompidou project has become an indispensable educational tool for recounting the history of art and thus the history of twentieth century society. The introduction of simple concepts such as the circle and the square, the theme at Aubagne, uses the juxtaposition of two pure forms to present pictorial works based on the square by Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill, Josef Albers, Francois Morellet as well as more contemporary works such as Carl Andre’s square floor tiles, coloured neon installations by Dan Flavin or Daniel Buren with his square wooden frame inset with yellow and white striped canvases. The form of the circle meanwhile appears in Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, that has its centenary in 2013, set against black-and-white compositions by Vasarely, Le Pont du remarquer by Leger, Sur le points by Kandinsky, and again in the strongly graphic composition by Auguste Herbin and the Disque de Newton by Kupka.

The Pompidou, an expert teacher, trains the leaders of the guided tours in each city with the use of special tools such as small binoculars to look at the details of Buren’s structure or tinted glasses that alter the colours of the works of Flavin. In this way art is approached as a game, complex concepts are made simple and comprehensible even though, as our guide confirms, explaining the work of Léger to children is impossible while it is simpler to explain the squares in Van Doesburg’s painting, where it breaks up into fragments to then come together again.

The process begun with the itinerant museum has become a model for cultural realities in the local communities that in some cases, have set up a collaboration with the Pompidou. However, the fact remains that it is a costly project for a temporary piece of architecture without finishes and exposed technological services. Although Bouchain stated it cost 2,000 euro a square metre (the same as a council house in France), now it will no longer be possible to take it to the French suburbs and it remains a nice but unfinished project. An interesting idea, that our museums – especially Maxxi – should use as an example.