Serge Lasvignes, 2019. Photo: Thibaut Chapotot/Centre Pompidou.

April 06, 2020 at 4:37pm

SERGE LASVIGNES TO SERVE SECOND TERM AS CENTRE POMPIDOU PRESIDENT

French Minister of Culture Franck Riester has renewed the contract of Serge Lasvignes, the president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. On Wednesday, April 1, the ministry announced that he would serve for a second term. Its decision to allow Lasvignes to lead the institution for an additional three years came as a surprise since the government had previously mandated that heads of public establishments must retire by the age of sixty-seven. In a statement, the ministry cited the institution’s need for continuity when it opted not to unseat Lasvignes, who turned sixty-six in March.

Lasvignes, who was first appointed president in 2015, after serving for nearly a decade as secretary general of the government under three successive presidents—Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and François Hollande—told Le Monde that he wanted to stay at the Parisian institution so that he could oversee several new projects. During his tenure, the Centre Pompidou has maintained annual visitor numbers of around 3 million people, spearheaded institutional partnerships, and moved forward with ambitious expansion plans, including the opening of the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum in Shanghai, which was inaugurated on November 5, 2019, but forced to temporarily close not long after as China rolled out safety measures to contain the spread of COVID-19.

“We must make it flourish, operate a true transfer of cultures, in both directions, establish relationships of trust of the same type as those which we have achieved in Málaga,” Lasvignes told Le Monde. The Centre Pompidou will maintain its outpost in the Andalusian city, which opened in 2015, until at least 2025. The institution is also continuing with its plans to open a satellite in Brussels in 2022, as well as a 237,000-square-foot “art factory” in Massy in the Ile-de-France area in 2025. Lasvignes was on the verge of signing an agreement for a branch in South Korea earlier this month, but the global disruption caused by the novel coronavirus has shelved the project.