Three Museums, One Shared Collection: M+, MoMA and the Centre Pompidou Join Forces

Three major modern art museums say they will treat their works as one shared collection. M+, the museum of visual culture in Hong Kong, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris announced the alliance in Hong Kong, according to ArtNews.

A shared collection means the three partners will plan and curate across all their holdings together, with staff working on three continents. ArtNews reports that the combined pool will number in the hundreds of thousands of objects. M+ alone holds around 8,000 objects.

The loans start soon. Beginning in late 2027, a selection of major works from M+ will hang in MoMA's collection galleries on long-term loan, meaning they are lent for an extended period while M+ keeps ownership. In 2028, a long-term Centre Pompidou gallery will open at MoMA.

The timing matters for Paris. The Centre Pompidou is closed for a five-year restoration of its building and is scheduled to reopen in 2030. M+ and the Pompidou had already agreed in May 2026 to co-organise exhibitions at M+ while the Paris building is renovated, and the new alliance builds on that deal.

Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon said the partners want to achieve more than they could alone. "If we succeed, we will be more than the sum of our parts, and I think that is something quite new," he said, as quoted by ArtNews.

Over the next five years, the three museums will co-organise an exhibition on "the contemporary", a term for art being made now. It will include works from all three collections and will be shown at all three institutions.

Curators from the Centre Pompidou and M+ will also join MoMA's research programme, C-MAP, which was founded in 2009. Research and curatorial exchanges form another strand of the deal. MoMA and M+ first signed a memorandum of understanding, a formal agreement that sets out intentions before a full contract, in February 2025.

To steer the work, a joint steering committee will bring together the three museum directors, department heads and curators. It will meet monthly, with one major in-person meeting each year. The first in-person meeting is due in November, at MoMA in New York.

For visitors, the scale of the partnership is already large. The three museums together welcome about 10 million people in person each year, and about 125 million visit online, based on current figures. Anyone who cannot reach New York, Paris or Hong Kong may still see some of these works, through galleries and exhibitions the partners plan to share.

M+ says it now has fifteen collaborative agreements with museums and cultural institutions around the world, and the Pompidou is one of them. The details of the exhibitions, loans and research projects will become clearer as the partners announce them.