Three of the world’s most influential homes for modern and contemporary art have decided to work as one. On 30 October 2026, the leaders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and M+ in Hong Kong signed a framework agreement for what they call an unprecedented cultural alliance. The signing took place at M+ in West Kowloon, in front of trustees and stakeholders from all three institutions.
Three museums, one pool of art
The idea is simple to state and complicated to execute: the partners want their audiences to have access to all three collections. That means long-term loans, co-organised exhibitions and programmes, and closer cooperation in curatorial research and conservation. Each museum stays independent and keeps its own name, but together they say they will be able to do more than any one of them could alone. Combined, they count around 10 million in-person visitors a year and roughly 125 million online visitors.
The timeline is staged. According to reporting on the announcement, selected works from M+ are due to go on long-term loan to MoMA from late 2027, and a long-term Centre Pompidou gallery is planned inside MoMA in 2028. A joint steering committee is to meet regularly to coordinate the work.
“Embassies for each other”
MoMA director Christophe Cherix described the three museums as becoming “embassies for each other”, a gateway that opens onto three continents. Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon put it more modestly: no single institution can cover the whole scope of global creativity, so the alliance is meant to allow deeper presentations of key artists and movements. Suhanya Raffel, director of M+, leads the youngest partner: MoMA was founded in 1929, the Pompidou in 1977 and M+ only opened in 2021, yet its holdings, including the Sigg collection of contemporary Chinese art, give the group a strong Asian anchor.
Why it matters now
The timing is not accidental. The Centre Pompidou’s Paris building is closed for a long renovation, and its works have been travelling widely. Museums everywhere are under pressure to cut the carbon footprint of shipping art back and forth for short shows, and to avoid buying the same kinds of works as their peers. Long-term shared loans address both problems at once.
Open questions remain. National ownership rules, especially for French public collections, insurance, and who decides what goes where will all need to be worked out as the partners move from a signed framework to actual galleries. But as a statement of intent, it is one of the boldest structural moves the museum world has seen in years: three collections spread across New York, Paris and Hong Kong, increasingly treated as one.