Serge Lasvignes, the former president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, has died aged 70. Born on 6 March 1954 in Toulouse, Lasvignes graduated from the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration in 1989. He joined the Council of State, a high-ranking governmental body, before occupying several positions at the ministry of education.
Lasvignes was also the Secretary General of the French government from 2006 to 2015, under three presidents including Nicolas Sarkozy, before his appointment as president of the Centre Pompidou in April 2015, a position he held until 2021.
“It is with great sadness that we learn of the death of Serge Lasvignes,” said his successor at the Centre Pompidou, Laurent Le Bon, in a statement. “This exceptional public servant was a visionary man whose mandate at the Centre Pompidou was marked by the impetus and completion of projects essential to the future of our institution.”
However, Lasvignes’s appointment to the Beaubourg Gallery was initially criticised, with the satirical publication Le Canard enchaîné calling him “a pen-pushing bureaucrat at the museum”. “Although he had a degree in modern literature, the newly promoted man had no proven experience in the visual arts or in running a major cultural institution,” Le Monde reported.
In 2019, Lasvignes helped devise plans to move the Pompidou’s collections to a new satellite venue in southern Paris, a fabrique de l’art (art factory) in Massy (Essonne) in the Ile-de-France area. Most of the 120,000-strong holdings held by the Musée national d’art moderne, housed at the Centre Pompidou, will move to the new hub which is reportedly due to open next year.
The Centre Pompidou extended its international reach during Lasvignes’s tenure. In 2019, he oversaw the opening of the Centre Pompidou X West Bund Museum in Shanghai and was also responsible for extending the life of the Centre Pompidou satellite space in Málaga, Spain, signing a new partnership contract with the Spanish city in 2018. He also supported the long-awaited KANAL-Centre Pompidou project in Brussels which is scheduled to open next year.
The French minister of culture, Rachida Dati, says in a statement: “With energy and passion, he made the Centre Pompidou a truly multidisciplinary place at the heart of major contemporary debates while considerably strengthening the institution’s international influence.”
