Pompidou satellite museum opens in France

The Centre Pompidou-Metz officially opened to the public on Wednesday. 
French President Nicolas Sarkozy helped open the first satellite location of Paris's famed Pompidou Centre, with a large, crowd-pleasing exhibit of masterpiece artworks welcoming patrons to the northeastern city of Metz.
"France is proud to be, no doubt, one of the few countries able to find the means to create investments of this importance in the middle of a crisis," Sarkozy told the gathered crowd at the museum, about 330 kilometres east of Paris, on Tuesday.
"France believes in art and France believes that investing in a museum as extraordinary as this one is as important as investing in a university, in a laboratory, in nanotechnology."
Designed by Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines, the open and inviting contemporary art museum and event space has been likened to a floppy hat, a lantern or a mushroom for its striking, undulating roof.
The new venue is designed to showcase more of the Pompidou's permanent collection of 65,000 works, since the original location in Paris only has room to display about 2,000 pieces at a time. It can also host live performances and multimedia shows.
The opening exhibit, titled Chefs-d'Oeuvre? (Masterpieces?), explores the notion of great art and spans more than 700 works created by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro, Andy Warhol, Wassily Kandinsky and Salvador Dali.

Aimed at drawing visitors to unlikely region

The Pompidou-Metz officially opened to the public Wednesday — the first of five days of free entry to encourage visitors to the new facility, which is near Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium.
The museum is France's first attempt at "cultural decentralization" — moving new arts venues and similar outposts away from the busy, tourist-heavy capital of Paris to spread out the economic and cultural benefits.
In 2012, the Louvre is also slated to open a branch location in the former mining town of Lens, in northern France.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke at the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou-Metz on Tuesday.