Nature may abhor a vacuum but art knows no such contempt. From silent music to invisible exhibitions, the last 50 years have seen the rise of a movement for which absence was presence, less was more and the void was full to the brim with meaning.

Now, for the first time since John Cage penned his noiseless 4'33 and Yves Klein invited thousands to view an empty, white-washed room, Paris's Pompidou Centre is devoting an entire exhibition to the art of nothing.

Hailed by one critic today as the most radical show ever seen inside a museum, Voids, a retrospective is a celebration of art which, as the artist Robert Barry put it, wants us to be "free for a moment to think about what we are going to do".

A re-creation of different exhibitions spanning 50 years, the retrospective stretches through nine rooms, all of which are unashamedly devoid of content. The freshly painted walls are uniformly white, the floors all pale wood parquet. The only features that stand out – a thermostat here, an exit sign there, a piece of tissue lying discarded in the doorway – take on a strange and surely unprecedented significance.

For Laurent Le Bon, director of the Pompidou Metz, the project is "at the frontline of artistic venture and the venture of art history". His fellow curator, Mathieu Copeland, told Le Monde it was intended to be a "real experience" whose participants would be challenged to think hard about their environment. "It was not just about creating a radically conceptual exhibition but inviting people to explore in a very physical way the spaces around them, each of which has its own texture," he said.

At the top of the bill is Klein, the original void-enthusiast, whose 1958 show at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris started the ball rolling with an "anti-blockbuster" whose defining characteristic was its lack of physical character. Such was hype ahead of The Void (or, to give it its full title, The Specialisation of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility, The Void) that around 3,000 people queued outside for their turn to pass through a blue curtain into an empty room.

The Pompidou accompanies his work with that of other artists who followed in his wake, such as Maria Eichhorn, Bethan Huws and Robert Irwin. The British collective Art & Language also plays its part with the resurrection of its 1967 Air-Conditioning Show, while Laurie Parsons' solo exhibition from 1990 is recreated with its original disdain for clutter (the invitations for the original New York show contained no names and no dates, just the address of the Lorence-Monk Gallery).

Denis Comy, an artist from Wales who was exploring the empty spaces this morning, said he was stunned by the "purity" of the concept. "You stand here in a major art gallery and you expect to see something," he said. "But it's just whiteness. Things like the emergency signs suddenly seem superfluous, intrusive."

Perhaps predictably, his feelings are not shared by everyone. A group of American students in Paris for spring break was less than impressed. "It's a load of bullshit," said one. "It's like they couldn't be assed so they just left it bare."