There's a profusion of bubbles and excitement at the Centre Pompidou. Never before has a major French cultural institution celebrated comics in this way. Five simultaneous exhibitions, over 1,000 originals on display, debates, live drawing concerts, workshops, and strips created for the occasion to be shared on Instagram. A year before its closure for renovation work (2025-2030), the Paris museum has decided to abandon itself to this great forgotten of cultural policies, until November.
The misfit offspring of literature and the fine arts, its two sources, comics have long carried the original sin of being aimed exclusively at children, as Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, used to say. The delay in its eventual development toward an adult readership, in the mid-1960s, postponed its artistic recognition even further. A process of legitimization has been underway for some years now.
It has seen the organization of solo exhibitions in high points of the museum landscape (Moebius at the Fondation Cartier in 2010, Crumb at the Palais de Tokyo in 2012 and Hergé at the Grand Palais in 2016). There was also the election of cartoonists to the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Catherine Meurisse in 2020 and Emmanuel Guibert in 2023), and the creation of a chair of comics at the Collège de France (awarded to Benoît Peeters in 2022).
What was missing was a comprehensive show, combining heritage and contemporary creation, in a temple of cultural dissemination. And here it is.
As its name suggests, "La BD à tous les étages" ("Comics on Every Floor") occupies every level of the Centre Pompidou, from basement to ceiling. The 1,100 square meters of gallery 2 (level 6) have been reserved for the main exhibition, a vast panorama of the history of the medium, from 1964 to the present day.
Just below, at the National Museum of Modern Art (level 5), contemporary authors (Blutch, Brecht Evens, Edmond Baudoin, Dominique Goblet and more) bring their pictures into dialogue with the masterpieces of great masters (Balthus, Paul Klee, Francis Picabia and Mark Rothko). An immersive, sensory installation by Marion Fayolle is on show in the Children's Gallery (level 1), while the culture and creation department presents a preview of the avant-garde magazine Lagon on level - 1.
At the Public Information Library (level 2), the spotlight is on the character of Corto Maltese, focusing on his romantic dimension. Through his dark – and very ambiguous, as is discovered here – hero, Hugo Pratt becomes the 10th comic book artist, since 2003, to occupy the space (after Jean-Marc Reiser, Willem, Art Spiegelman and Claire Bretécher). This is proof that the Centre Pompidou has long been examining comics, even if the medium, a bookish object by its nature, has always been confined to the library – with a few exceptions. Seeing it today on the upper floors – devoted to the so-called major arts (painting, sculpture) – is like an investiture. A consecration, some would say.
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