In Warsaw, a Major New Museum Opens at a Cultural Turning Point

Art is hot in Warsaw—blazing even more at the moment because artists know that very soon, an icy reactionary wind could blow it all away.

The long-awaited Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, or MSN (its Polish initials), opened on February 21, with cutting-edge exhibitions on political engagement, ecological catastrophe, commodity capitalism, and the celebration (and violation) of the human body. Unlike most new museums, which strive for architectural transparency to welcome visitors intimidated by art, the MSN is an austere, low white box of monumental proportions, stretching 100 meters long. Rather than openness, it evokes permanence.

One reason for that is its overweening neighbor, the Palace of Culture and Science. A temple of Soviet power that grafts classical columns onto neo-Gothic verticality, the Palace was the tallest building in Poland upon its completion in 1955. Dedicated to Stalin, it survived the Soviet downfall and Poland’s transition into the European Union.

“They didn’t tear it down,” says the MSN’s architect, Thomas Phifer. “You can’t put something next to it that looks impermanent.” Clad in white concrete and outfitted with massive steel doors, the MSN proclaims endurance. “We wanted to give the building a sense of presence and permanence, a metaphor for physical weight,” he explains. At the request of Joanna Mytkowska, the museum director, even the galleries are fixed spaces, not divided by movable walls.

However, beneath this aura of solidity lies nail-biting apprehension. As the museum administrators know all too well, their enterprise rests on political quicksand. Acknowledging what the architecture denies, the curators titled their inaugural exhibition “The Impermanent: Four Takes on the Collection”—a selection of 150 of the 4,300 works owned by the museum, up through September.

“Impermanence isn’t just a reference to the way many modern art museums operate, showing work in changing shows,” Mytkowska says. “It’s also an important feature of contemporary culture, the need to constantly negotiate meanings, the lack of permanent points of reference. It is something that art can offer us, in the face of culture wars, anxieties, and fears.”

Poland has been ravaged by brutal conflicts for centuries, and the vicious if mostly bloodless culture wars of today have not spared it. When the museum opened after 20 years of lurching back-and-forths in its development, a liberal coalition had been in power for 14 months, and the next presidential election, scheduled for May 18, was merely three months away. A cloud hung over the festivities; the building would surely withstand a victory by Law and Justice, the conservative party, but the curators’ program might not.

From 2015 through 2023, Law and Justice culture minister Piotr Glinski installed museum directors who furthered his nationalist agenda. I saw the contrast between then and now at Zachęta, the national gallery of modern art in Warsaw. (Partly insulated from the political winds by the progressive policies of its municipality, the MSN is jointly controlled by the city of Warsaw and the national cultural ministry.) One of the exhibitions there, “Repeat After Me II,” had been previously shown in the Polish Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. It was a grim karaoke bar, in which visitors were invited to stand at microphones and repeat the sounds of war voiced in a video by people who have been displaced by the Ukraine conflict.

“Repeat After Me II” had been brought to Venice at the last minute. It was the runner-up to the winner under Glinski: a burning swastika between representations of the leaders of Poland’s two traditional enemies, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Germany’s Angela Merkel. This recent change in worldview was mirrored by the other shows at Zachęta, which dealt with Polish political polarization and LGBTQ activism. “Before, they were inviting far-right classical painters and showing a lot of far-right art—religious, anti-German,” says Marta Czyz, the Zachęta curator who took “Repeat After Me II” to Venice.

A similar sea change has occurred at Warsaw’s other center for contemporary art, Ujazdowski Castle, where the nationalist swastika work had been displayed before the Glinski-appointed director was dismissed in June. Released from orthodox stagnation, the curators in October invited artists working in Poland to propose exhibitions. They received over 700 applications and selected 36. “The public and artists came back,” says artistic director Marianna Dobkowska. “So much life, and so many beautiful projects realized.” Right now, there are compelling exhibitions, one exploring the solitary inner worlds of sex-starved, misogynistic “incels,” the other of textile art by eight young women. A residence for visiting artists as well as an exhibition space, the Castle thrums with the exhilaration of newly won freedom.

A comparable energy animates the far larger show at MSN, embracing artists from the 1950s through today—40 percent of them from Poland. Beautifully installed, mixing the well-known and the emerging, the exhibition celebrates the sense of openness and possibility that now exists, all the more precious as it contrasts with the painful situation of nearby Ukraine.

But like the ruined colossus in Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” the looming shadow of the Palace of Culture and Science, now a mishmash of restaurants, theaters, and offices, is a reminder that what seems eternal is ephemeral. Art in Poland is so exciting in part because it is so fragile. Everyone knows that power shifts. Tastes change. Things that are honored today may well be reviled tomorrow. Permanence is merely a facade.