PARIS—A Louise Bourgeois large container incorporating what looks like a New York City water tower is the first piece you see as you get off the escalator, setting the tone. Francis Bacon’s 1972 “Female Nude Standing in a Doorway,” typical of the painter’s use of violent strokes and surface treatment is also among the Centre Pompidou’s new acquisitions, along with a Jean Prouvé prefabricated house, one of the architect’s nomadic constructions using standard, inexpensive industrial materials without sacrificing any aesthetic integrity.

In the past 30 years, since the museum’s 1977 inaugural show of Marcel Duchamp, The Centre Pompidou has rehung its collection six times—and most likely will repeat the procedure in another few years. About 10 percent of the museum’s collection of roughly 60,000 works by some 5,000 artists is currently on view. And two entire floors of the building have an entirely “new” presentation of selections from the museum’s comprehensive collection of modern and contemporary art, dating from the 1960s and beyond. Each of the newly hung galleries is an environment designed around a theme such as conceptualism, minimalism and figuration, or devoted to a particular period or one artist’s work.

Unlike New York’s Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum, the Pompidou is a multi-faceted institution incorporating the National Museum of Modern Art, the Brancusi workshop and museum, the Kandinsky Museum and the Institute for Music Research, as well as a vast public reference library. For more information visit www.centrepompidou.fr.