If you are an art lover, Paris should be the first city on your list of art destinations. There are a huge number of fantastic museums here, but it’s still best to start with the largest and oldest. Built in the early 12th century, the Louvre was previously used as a royal fortress. It was turned into a museum in the late 1700s and today there are some 35,000 works of art on display. Some of the most famous art treasures in the world are here, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Another must-see place is the Musée d’Orsay, located in the former building of the train station of the same name. Here you will find the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works in the world. The museum contains works from the period 1848-1914 and includes works by Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and many others.

Fans of contemporary art should definitely visit the Modus Art Gallery, which features an eclectic, ever-changing collection. Other famous galleries include the Yvon Lambert Gallery. Yvon Lambert, Galerie Xippas and La Maison Rouge.

One of the main centers of contemporary art is the Georges Pompidou National Center for Arts and Culture.
The building was built in 1977 and is one of the most impressive buildings of the XX century. In the beginning, its architecture caused great controversy, but in time, it won the recognition of both professional critics and the general public.

Beautiful permanent exhibitions of contemporary art, as well as daring avant-garde exhibitions, attract a huge number of visitors. Thanks to the building’s architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the conventional notion of what an art gallery should look like has been turned upside down.

The Pompidou Center is one of the three most visited places in Paris, which are the most visited – you can guess.
The building is a glass parallelepiped very large for the center of Paris: it has a length of 166 m, width 60 m and a height of 42 meters. The original idea of the architects was to locate all the technical structures (fittings, all the pipelines, elevators and escalators) outside the building to free up a maximum usable area of 40,000 square meters. Fittings are painted white, ventilation pipes are blue, water pipes are green, electrical wiring is yellow, and escalators and elevators are red.

The Pompidou Center includes the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the library, the Industrial Design Center, the Institute for the Study and Coordination of Acoustics and Music, concert and exhibition halls, and several cinemas.

The vast square in front of the building is beloved by artists, strolling artists, musicians and circus performers. To the right of the Pompidou Center the small square of Stravinsky is decorated by an extravagant fountain of the same name, consisting of many unusual metal mechanisms moving by means of water.