Seoul’s Centre Pompidou + gallery news

Seoul’s Centre Pompidou Hanwha is set to open on June 4, giving South Korea a new outpost of the Paris museum as other institutions push ahead with expansion and restitution cases. (centrepompidou.fr) The Seoul museum is housed in the 63 Building in Yeouido, spans more than 10,000 square meters across four levels, and will open with “The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision” on June 4, 2026. The project follows a four-year partnership agreement signed in 2023 between Centre Pompidou and Hanwha. (centrepompidou.fr) Artnews reported that June 4 was chosen to mark the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between France and Korea, and that French President Emmanuel Macron visited the site on April 3. The same report said Hanwha’s deal gives the Seoul museum the Pompidou brand for four years, with eight exhibitions planned at a rate of two per year. (artnews.com) In London, the National Gallery said on April 7 that Kengo Kuma and Associates will design a new wing on the site of St Vincent House. The Art Newspaper reported the project at an estimated £350 million, with opening planned for the early 2030s. (theartnewspaper.com) The new London building will extend the National Gallery’s collection display from the late nineteenth century to the present, reflecting director Gabriele Finaldi’s decision last year to move beyond the museum’s old circa-1900 cutoff. Plans include temporary exhibition galleries at street level, bridge links to the Sainsbury Wing and Wilkins building, and a public roof garden. (theartnewspaper.com) A separate New York court ruling is also reshaping the market for twentieth-century art. On April 6, The Art Newspaper reported that a New York Supreme Court judge ordered dealer David Nahmad to return Modigliani’s *Seated Man With a Cane* (1918) after finding that Oscar Stettiner had a superior right to the painting before its wartime seizure. (theartnewspaper.com) The case ran for 11 years in New York, but the painting’s history reaches back to Paris in 1939, when Stettiner fled before the Nazi occupation and the collection he left behind was seized and resold. Nahmad bought the work at Christie’s in 1996 for $3.2 million, and The Art Newspaper said it is now estimated at as much as $30 million. (theartnewspaper.com) Museums are dealing with a parallel problem in technology-based art, where the artwork can depend on aging screens, file formats, software, or playback equipment. The Art Newspaper reported on April 9 that curators and conservators are treating those works as central to contemporary art even as the hardware and formats that carry them become obsolete. (theartnewspaper.com) That report pointed to the Julia Stoschek Foundation’s first major United States presentation in Los Angeles, where works from its collection were shown at the Variety Arts Theater. Julia Stoschek said video art had long been “curatorially acknowledged, but structurally underestimated,” even as time-based media became more central to contemporary practice. (theartnewspaper.com) The George Eastman Museum in Rochester has built the archival side of that work for decades. The museum says it preserves moving images “in all media and formats,” maintains more than 26 million feet of nitrate film at the Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, and has run the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation since 1996. (eastman.org) Taken together, the Seoul opening, the National Gallery commission, the Modigliani ruling, and the conservation push show how museums are trying to grow, correct old ownership claims, and keep newer art forms viewable at the same time. The next dates are concrete: June 4 in Seoul, and a longer runway into the early 2030s in London. (centrepompidou.fr)