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During most of the five years when the striking new home of Warsaw\u2019s Museum of Modern Art<\/a> was under construction, Poland was governed by the conservative Law and Justice Party, whose lawmakers tried to shift the country\u2019s culture to the right<\/a>. Officials ousted liberal directors at major institutions and replaced them with conservatives whose shows often promoted traditional values and artistic styles.<\/p>\n Now, Poland is governed by a more centrist coalition<\/a> that is committed to reversing that cultural swerve, and many of those Law and Justice appointees<\/a> have been fired. But when the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s $176-million new home finally opened last week, its director, Joanna Mytkowska, said she had decided on a different course.<\/p>\n Her plan, she said in an interview, was to aim for the middle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe Impermanent<\/a>,\u201d the museum\u2019s debut exhibition, which opened Friday and runs through Oct. 4, features some 150 paintings, sculptures and installations from the museum\u2019s collection. Those works include many pieces that reflect on traditionally liberal themes including gay, women\u2019s and immigrant\u2019s rights. But other works touch on issues that animate Polish conservatives, including the legacies of Communism and the Holocaust.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n When the museum was housed in a less prominent location across town, the wall texts were often more like \u201cmanifestoes,\u201d Mytkowska said. Now that it was in the heart of Warsaw, the museum had to cater to a broader audience, she added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The opening show contains four sections: on pop art, socially-engaged art, abstract art and spirituality in art practice. To show how artists\u2019 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<\/a>, and Petrit Halilaj, the artist from Kosovo who last year installed sculptures<\/a> on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.<\/p>\n The display features some huge, colorful, crowd pleasers, like Magdalena Abakanowicz\u2019s \u201cMonumental Composition\u201d \u2014 a 26-foot red woolen sculpture hanging from the ceiling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019s National Museum, removed some stills from the work<\/a> that were on display at his museum, leading to a<\/a> banana-eating protest outside<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mytkowska said that she had not included the work as a provocation, but to reflect how the incident had turned the work into \u201cpart of the Polish imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n The Museum of Art\u2019s new building has also been a source of controversy throughout the 20 years since it was first proposed.<\/p>\n Local officials scrapped an initial contest to choose an architect for the site, opposite Warsaw\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Some Warsaw residents are unhappy with the design and have compared the new museum to an Amazon warehouse<\/a>. Yet when \u201cThe Impermanent<\/a>\u201d opened, a museum spokesman said that there were almost 12,500 visitors in the show\u2019s first three days.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In interviews at the museum\u2019s opening party last Friday, several Polish artists with work in the show said that they agreed with Mytkowska\u2019s decision to aim for a middle ground in Poland\u2019s culture war.<\/p>\n Karol Radziszewski<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Still, Radziszewski said, he feared that museums across Poland were becoming \u201cmore safe,\u201d leaving few outlets for experimental work. \u201cThe middle is everywhere now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Agnieszka Pindera, the newly appointed director of the Zacheta<\/a> contemporary art museum in Warsaw said that recent exhibitions at her institution \u2014 including a show about the bisexual Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov<\/a> \u2014 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 \u2014 including one on the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi \u2014 had little to do with politics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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<\/a> by offering for sale a copy of Maia Kobabe\u2019s \u201cGender Queer: A Memoir,\u201d a graphic novel that activists in the United States have campaigned to get banned<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mytkowska said that the book had been on a high shelf and inaccessible to children. The whole scandal was overblown, she added.<\/p>\n Even if some right-wing lawmakers were attacking her museum, Mytkowska said she hoped that conservatives would not be deterred from visiting. \u201cIf contemporary art only talks to one milieu,\u201d Mytkowska said, \u201cthat\u2019s the end of contemporary art.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n