During most of the five years when the striking new home of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art was under construction, Poland was governed by the conservative Law and Justice Party, whose lawmakers tried to shift the country’s culture to the right. Officials ousted liberal directors at major institutions and replaced them with conservatives whose shows often promoted traditional values and artistic styles.
Now, Poland is governed by a more centrist coalition that is committed to reversing that cultural swerve, and many of those Law and Justice appointees have been fired. But when the Museum of Modern Art’s $176-million new home finally opened last week, its director, Joanna Mytkowska, said she had decided on a different course.
Her plan, she said in an interview, was to aim for the middle.
“The Impermanent,” the museum’s debut exhibition, which opened Friday and runs through Oct. 4, features some 150 paintings, sculptures and installations from the museum’s collection. Those works include many pieces that reflect on traditionally liberal themes including gay, women’s and immigrant’s rights. But other works touch on issues that animate Polish conservatives, including the legacies of Communism and the Holocaust.
Mytkowska said that even when artworks address political concerns, she had decided that the wall texts would only feature simple descriptions to try and leave them open to interpretation.
When the museum was housed in a less prominent location across town, the wall texts were often more like “manifestoes,” Mytkowska said. Now that it was in the heart of Warsaw, the museum had to cater to a broader audience, she added.
The opening show contains four sections: on pop art, socially-engaged art, abstract art and spirituality in art practice. To show how artists’ ideas changed over time, each section contains pieces from 1950 to the present day. Most of the artists featured are Polish, but there are also works by international stars including the British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Petrit Halilaj, the artist from Kosovo who last year installed sculptures on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The display features some huge, colorful, crowd pleasers, like Magdalena Abakanowicz’s “Monumental Composition” — a 26-foot red woolen sculpture hanging from the ceiling.
But it also features a handful of works that have previously angered Polish conservatives, like a film by the Polish artist Natalia L.L. that depicts a woman seductively licking a banana. In 2020, Jerzy Miziolek, the Law and Justice-appointed director of Poland’s National Museum, removed some stills from the work that were on display at his museum, leading to a banana-eating protest outside.
Mytkowska said that she had not included the work as a provocation, but to reflect how the incident had turned the work into “part of the Polish imagination.”
The Museum of Art’s new building has also been a source of controversy throughout the 20 years since it was first proposed.
Local officials scrapped an initial contest to choose an architect for the site, opposite Warsaw’s imposing communist-era Palace of Culture and Science, after onerous rules kept away star Western architects. In 2007, Christian Kerez, a Swiss architect, won a revived contest, but many Warsaw residents objected to his minimalist design, saying it was too plain to grab global attention. A rectangular white building by the American architect Thomas Phifer won a third contest and parts of the building opened to the public late last year.
Some Warsaw residents are unhappy with the design and have compared the new museum to an Amazon warehouse. Yet when “The Impermanent” opened, a museum spokesman said that there were almost 12,500 visitors in the show’s first three days.
In interviews at the museum’s opening party last Friday, several Polish artists with work in the show said that they agreed with Mytkowska’s decision to aim for a middle ground in Poland’s culture war.
Karol Radziszewski, a painter, said that many Poles struggled to see the importance of contemporary art. Exhibitions filled with politically provocative works would antagonize them more, he said.
Still, Radziszewski said, he feared that museums across Poland were becoming “more safe,” leaving few outlets for experimental work. “The middle is everywhere now,” he said.
Agnieszka Pindera, the newly appointed director of the Zacheta contemporary art museum in Warsaw said that recent exhibitions at her institution — including a show about the bisexual Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov — would never have been staged under the last conservative director, who preferred to show traditional paintings. However, she said, conservative visitors were still welcome at her museum and some of its upcoming shows — including one on the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi — had little to do with politics.
Pindera said that she understood why the high-profile Museum of Modern Art would try and steer a path between right and left, but she added that it was likely a futile effort. Conservative lawmakers had already criticized the institution for political gain, she said.
So far, those attacks had not focused on art on the walls, but on items in the gift shop, which has been open since October. Earlier this month Law and Justice Party lawmakers reported the museum to prosecutors, accusing it of displaying child pornography by offering for sale a copy of Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” a graphic novel that activists in the United States have campaigned to get banned.
Mytkowska said that the book had been on a high shelf and inaccessible to children. The whole scandal was overblown, she added.
Even if some right-wing lawmakers were attacking her museum, Mytkowska said she hoped that conservatives would not be deterred from visiting. “If contemporary art only talks to one milieu,” Mytkowska said, “that’s the end of contemporary art.”
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