I’ve arrived in the city of museums. In addition to Warsaw’s National Museum (old art) and Zacheta (more recent art), Poland’s capital hosts museums dedicated to: posters, peasants, neon, caricatures, industry and independence. There’s a museum to “cursed soldiers and political prisoners” and a Be Happy Museum.
“It’s Eastern Europe. It’s a country of intellectuals,” explains Joanna Mytkowska, director of MSN Warsaw, a vast new contemporary art museum that has been built in the looming shadow of the rocket-shaped Soviet-era Palace of Culture and Science on Parade Square, the largest city square in Europe.
At the institution’s opening on February 21, Mytkowska tells me that MSN Warsaw has been in gestation for nearly two decades. During that time, as is the tradition in this city, the project has been buffeted by political machinations. There’s been legal wrangling over who owns the land, dating back to before Marxist-Leninist days, and spats about both the art and the architecture. It didn’t help that it was being built over metro tunnels.
The appreciation of contemporary art is relatively new in Poland, says Mytkowska. “This is good and bad. Because on the one hand you have these controversies and all these questions, but on the other hand it’s very fresh and art still has an impact on social life. But it’s new territory for people.”
Has navigating this territory made her as much a politician as a museum director? “I would call it a diplomat more than a politician,” she smiles. “Because I have no power.”
Of course, a new contemporary art museum requires a statement building. Enter Thomas Phifer, the New York-based American architect who has created a retro-futurist masterpiece, all marbled concrete and milky, naturally lit spaces. It’s like a calm secular chapel of worship for disciples of the avant-garde.
From the outside, the building looks like a high-end hi-fi stack: flat and elegant. Inside it’s an echo chamber of light. The light in Warsaw is different to that in the US, Phifer tells me. “It’s so beautiful and so unpredictable, it changes so rapidly.”
During the construction process, a Polish craftsman pulled him aside and told him: “This building is a matter of pride for us.” Phifer is now designing a theatre to be built on a neighbouring plot.
In the opening press conference, Hanna Wróblewska, Poland’s minister of culture and national heritage, spoke about Warsaw’s need to be forward-looking and sensitive to the ongoing struggle to preserve artistic freedom in democratic countries. Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Centre in New York is a worrying sign of the rise of political interference in important institutions.
However, Poland is well versed in such cultural throttling. One curator told me that during the early 2000s, museum curators were actively “tugging on the Catholic chain”. They tugged back: in 2000, right wing Polish politician Witold Tomczak came into Zacheta’s galleries and vandalised Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora, a sculpture of Pope John Paul II being struck by a meteorite. The result: the museum’s director was fired for putting the piece there in the first place.
Talking to reporters at MSN, Wróblewska referred to “the mistakes of our forefathers”. It’s a subject she knows only too well: she served as the director of Zacheta from 2010 to 2021, until she was forced out by the government.
But the new museum’s inaugural exhibition – The Impermanent – addresses politics, consumerism, folklore and the autonomy of art. For a lay audience, it is a revelation. More than half of the works on view are by women, and Polish works are interspersed with those by international artists.
In the bustle of the opening, Mytkowska explains that her “job is much more than art history and curating and cultural activities. And I was always fascinated with this aspect of art, that this is very much about society.”
When Poland joined the European Union, she said, its government had a plan to build five big museums. These included the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, Museum of the History of Poland, Museum of the History of Polish Military Forces and Museum of Polish Jewish History.
“And us,” says Mytkowska. “We are the only museum dedicated to contemporary art. Poland is very much about history. That’s why MSN Warsaw is so special, we are completely about now and the future.”
Christian House is a freelance journalist writing about the arts
