The Grand Palais isn’t a museum, even though the name makes you think it is: inside this stone and glass there’s no permanent collection to follow room by room, only a calendar of exhibitions that changes several times a year. That’s the first misunderstanding to get out of the way: the Louvre and the Orsay are twenty to thirty minutes’ walk from here, and anyone who arrives expecting something similar is left wrong-footed at the ticket desk.
The building you see today has only just got its full shape back, after four years of works that cost almost 470 million euros: closed for restoration from 12 March 2021, it reopened on 6 June 2025, apart from the science museum in the west wing. There’s no single ticket to get in, though. Here you don’t pay to see the building, you pay to see what it’s hosting at that moment, and the price and the hours depend on the exhibition running in the Nef.
There’s one last thing to know before you book: the museum everyone took for granted in the middle of the city, the Centre Pompidou, is closed for works until 2030, and a good part of what it has to say it now says from right here, under this dome.
How does a palace built for a seven-month exhibition end up as the temporary home of a museum that has no home any more?
Let’s go!
1. A palace built in three years, signed by four architects
How do you design a palace of this scale as a group, when none of the four signatories holds control of the whole?
You do it by cutting it into pieces. On 22 April 1896 a group of four architects won the competition for the new palace of the fine arts, and they carved the building up as if it were a smallholding: Henri Deglane designed the north and south aisles of the great Nef, the façades and the decoration facing the Champs-Élysées; Albert Louvet drew the overall plan and the central section, the Salon d’honneur included, and worked with Deglane on the grand staircase; Albert Thomas built the west wing, the Palais d’Antin, on his own; Charles Girault coordinated the site and kept his colleagues in agreement, while signing the whole of the twin Petit Palais across the avenue, alone.
Work began in 1897, after the old Palais de l’Industrie was demolished, and ran against a clock that none of the four could stop: the Exposition Universelle opened on 15 April 1900. The Grand Palais was inaugurated on 1 May 1900, and on the pediment facing the Champs-Élysées it had its own dedication carved, which you can still read today: monument dedicated by the Republic to the glory of French art. Conceived for a seven-month exhibition, it has stood there ever since.
2. The Nef and the two quadrigas watching over Paris
The heart of the building is the Nef, the great central hall that Deglane designed almost 240 metres long and 50 wide, with the metal vault rising to 35 metres and the lantern of the dome reaching 60. Above your head runs a roof of 17,500 square metres of glass, the largest in Europe, set on a mixed structure of iron, light steel and reinforced concrete that in the 1890s was almost experimental.
Outside, at the corners of the roof, two copper quadrigas by the sculptor Georges Récipon watch over the city from opposite sides: L’Immortalité devançant le Temps races toward the Champs-Élysées, L’Harmonie triomphant de la Discorde toward the Seine. Each weighs 12 tonnes and the horses rear up on the roof: look up at them from below and they seem light, but up there they’re anything but. Récipon modelled them in time for 1900; Paris took them down in 2001 for a three-year restoration, and the two quadrigas went back in place when the restoration was over, in 2004.
3. Horses, biplanes and microscopes: a century of different trades
Once the 1900 Exposition was over, the Grand Palais never went back to doing just one thing. In the early decades of the twentieth century the Nef hosted horse shows, complete with jumps and grandstands, then became the Paris motor show and the meeting point of early aviation, with whole biplanes assembled under the glass roof. During the First World War it became a military hospital, and during the German occupation its story turned darker, with propaganda exhibitions for the Nazi regime staged right here.
The longest-lasting trade arrived in 1937, and it had nothing to do with art: the physicist Jean Perrin, Nobel laureate in 1926, turned the west wing, the Palais d’Antin signed by Thomas, into a science museum meant to show research “in action”, as part of that year’s International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques. The next year the project became permanent: the Palais de la Découverte was born, and the square you look out on today, the Square Jean Perrin, still bears its founder’s name.
4. The longest building site in its history
The Grand Palais closed for restoration on 12 March 2021, and the works that followed were the longest and the costliest in its history: four years of building for almost 470 million euros, covering the rebuilding of the glass roof, new entrances, accessibility and the recovery of the natural light that decades of protective paint had darkened above the Nef.
The reopening didn’t come all at once. In the summer of 2024 the Nef hosted two sports of the Paris Olympic Games, fencing and taekwondo, while the rest of the building was still a building site; in the autumn the trade fairs and the first shows came back, and in December came the first real exhibition, devoted to Chiharu Shiota. All the spaces reopened together on 6 June 2025, the science museum in the west wing excluded, and the reopening was celebrated with a season called “Grand Palais d’été”, with installations of white balloons hanging in the Nef and a major exhibition devoted to Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely.
5. The Pompidou without a home: what you see inside today
Why does the most famous modern art museum in Paris tell its story today from a palace that isn’t its own?
Because its own is closed. The Centre Pompidou has stopped operating in its historic building for a restoration that will last until 2030, and in the meantime it takes its collections and its programme outside its walls, in a programme it calls Constellation. Besides the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Málaga and Massy, two Paris stops take the bulk of it: the Grand Palais and the Panthéon.
Here at the Grand Palais the stop is called Cezanne et nous, running until 17 January 2027: not a retrospective, but nearly 180 works that set Cézanne beside the artists who took him as a model, from Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso to Mondrian, Joan Mitchell and Bridget Riley, co-produced by the Centre Pompidou itself together with the Musée d’Orsay. From December 2026 they are joined by Girls. Adolescence, Mode, Rébellion and an exhibition on Mika Ninagawa. At the Panthéon, within the same programme, you’ll find until the end of January 2027 Vies minuscules, devoted to the Pompidou’s collections from another angle.
6. The Palais de la Découverte is still closed
A warning, before you set off with the wrong idea: the Palais de la Découverte, the science museum founded by Jean Perrin in the wing that Thomas had built for the 1900 Exposition, you can’t visit. It has been closed since 2020 for a restoration of its own, separate from the Nef’s, and its reopening, planned for 11 June 2025 and then postponed, is now announced for March 2027.
The dome of that wing, the one you see from the inner courtyard when you look out from the Nef side, stayed shut even during the days of the big 2025 reopening party, with the banner of the “Grand Palais d’été” season hanging a few metres from a door that wasn’t opening. Inside, the science museum stayed in the dark.
Practical information
Figures checked on 9 October 2026 on the official website grandpalais.fr. Prices, hours and the exhibition programme change often: check again before you leave.
Where to go next
A few steps away, across avenue Winston-Churchill, you’ll find its smaller twin: the Petit Palais, built for the same 1900 Exposition and signed in full by Charles Girault, who had coordinated the building site here. Admission to its permanent collection is free, unlike here. And if you want to follow the rest of the Centre Pompidou away from home, the other Paris stop on the Constellation programme is inside the Panthéon, about fifty minutes’ walk away, on the other side of the Seine.
Photographs: façade by Matthias Süßen (CC BY-SA 4.0); interior of the Nef by Yasminkaa (CC0); Harmony quadriga by Jebulon (CC0), from Wikimedia Commons.
