Centre Pompidou to Remain Open in MÁlaga Through 2034

TheCentre Pompidouhas inked a partnership deal with Málaga, Spain’s city council that will allow its outpost in the coastal town to remain open there through 2034. The council has agreed to pay the museum €2.7 million ($2.9 million) annually from 2025 through 2029, and €3.1 million ($3.4 million) from 2030 through 2034.

Debuting as a pop-up along the city’s waterfront in 2015, the 65,000-square-foot museum is notable for the brightly hued glass cube created by French artist Daniel Buren that crowns its subterranean structure. The satellite drew 200,000 visitors in its first year of operation, its earlysuccess spurringother branches of the revered French institution, inSeoul,Shanghai, andSaudi Arabia’s AlUla heritage region, for instance (the Seoul and Saudi outposts are still pending). Since then, the Málaga museum has drawn more than a million visitors and has seen its deal renewed twice, once in 2018, for five years, and then most recently for ten years.

The extension represents a vote of confidence in the Pompidou brand, which has in recent months struggled to retain its luster. In June, the Art Newspaper reported that the Cour des Comptes, France’s supreme audit institution, had expressed concern that the Paris museum’s planned renovation, which will see it close for five years beginning in 2025, is at “high risk of slippage in terms of costs and deadlines” and that it is “underfunded and insufficiently piloted.” The court praised the Málaga outpost’s success but termed the Pompidou’s other international branches “experimental.” Museum chair Laurent Le Bon noted that satellites in Brussels, Shanghai, and Jersey City, New Jersey, had raked in a collective €16 million ($17.4 million) in 2023, compared with just €6 million ($6.5 million) before the pandemic. In late June, New Jersey lawmakers pulled funding for the still-in-the-works Centre Pompidou x Jersey City, imperiling its future.