ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 24, I felt a disproportionate sense of excitement and anticipation, a feeling much too intense for the opening of an art venue. For me, this wasn’t just the debut of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art (MSN Warsaw) building, this was the end of an era. I “grew up” with the institution, which operated without a permanent home for two decades. All the while, I observed the various perturbations and victories that eventually led to the museum’s final construction in Warsaw’s downtown Plac Defilad adjacent to the city’s towering Palace of Culture and Science—a skyscraper erected in the 1950s by Joseph Stalin himself as a “gift” to the people of Poland. Today the museum, with director Joanna Mytkowska at the helm, is driven by two main goals: to contend with Poland’s difficult past while communicating its plans for a future of transparency.
Upon entering MSN Warsaw’s galleries, one encounters a socialist realist bronze titled Przyjaźń (Pomnik Przyjaźni Polsko-Radzieckiej)(Friendship [Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship]), 1954. The work shows two men in a welcoming pose, holding each other in a way that is meant to be fraternal but could just as easily be read as homoerotic. The pair represent a soldier and a worker, arm in arm—an allegorical depiction of Polish and Soviet camaraderie—while the imperialist USSR looms, cynically using the idea of “friendship” to cover up its abuse of power. The sculpture formerly stood at the entrance of the Stalinist Palace of Culture, but after the system’s collapse in the early 1990s, the figures’ arms and the heavy flag they once held were removed to recycle the work.
The version of the sculpture we see now serves as a potent symbol of the newly opened museum, which has struggled to establish itself beneath the communist Palace’s long shadow for almost twenty years. The work is by Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish artist of Jewish origin who, after surviving internment in Nazi concentration camps, struggled to become a communist artist. Its prominent placement within the space is part of the museum’s founding myth, and speaks to what lies ahead.
On my first visit, I was struck by the museum’s stark white-cube-like edifice, harshly set against the backdrop of central Warsaw—an area that has been rapidly dressing its 1960s modernism with swanky shiny office blocks and skyscrapers. The design, by the New York architect Thomas Phifer, has already gathered plenty of criticism from the public on the internet: “white log,” “white shed,” “resembling a retail logistic center,” “unimaginative,” and an unworthy competitor against the Byzantine ornamentalism of the tyrannical Palace looming behind it. Yet this simplicity is deceptive, as the interior of Phifer’s building is all about shape-shifting light. With its spectacular staircase shaped like lightning bolts zigzagging through one another, the interior feels like a Rubik’s cube with precisely drilled holes through it. The building will be “resilient” with movable walls, which will diminish the necessity to build dividers for exhibitions just to demolish them afterward, thus reducing the institution’s CO2 trail.
This Zen-like architectural clarity conceals a traumatic background, with more failed projects and dashed hopes than meets the eye. The first push to establish a Museum of Modern Art in Poland emerged in the 1980s, when the prominent gallerist Anda Rottenberg tried to convince the (still communist) authorities of the profound significance this kind of institution could bring to the nation’s capital. “Warsaw is the only central city in Europe without a modern art museum”—she argued, but socialist Poland wasn’t ready for it. The idea recurred in the 1990s with the possibility of starchitect Frank Gehry himself designing the building in an effort to reproduce a version of the Bilbao effect and put Poland on a path toward urban revitalization. These proposals, as well as several subsequent others, fell through mostly due to land speculation, which has been a recurring curse on newly reprivatized Poland, reversing its communist laws. MSN Warsaw, in its current incarnation, was born around 2005 with a firm resolution to situate the museum on the Parade Square. In 2005, the Swiss architect Christian Kerez won a public competition to design the building, but his project turned out far too big and expensive for the city’s capacities. The current project by Phifer (which won a second competition in 2016) is significantly smaller, and more open, a gesture that aims to focus attention on the art objects and shifting light more than the structure itself.
“The current building is the opposite of the ‘Bilbao era,’ when people considered the architecture to be a star,” Tomasz Fudala, the museum’s longest-serving curator and architecture expert, tells me. He was present though the institution’s every rise and fall over the past twenty years and has been commenting on the city’s dramatic changes over the years through his curation of the “Warsaw Under Construction” festival. “The building doesn’t aim at spectacle. It is not trying to dazzle you with details. It is supposed to be architecture [that is] ready to adapt to the changing needs of the public, [that is] able to resist crises.” The main architectural elements are panoramic windows opening the space to previously unseen views of the city, stressing the idea of a museum’s transparency. Sandwiched between the Stalinist Palace and the so-called Eastern Wall of shopping malls designed by Zbigniew Karpiński in the 1960s, MSN Warsaw strives to exist in dialogue with the Palace, as opposed to in competition. The building frames the city surrounding it, consciously making Warsaw part of the art itself.
That said, the new building will remain the main attraction for a while, as the museum has quite a scarce collection of its own and decided to plan its two-week opening program predominantly around performance, including Ndayé Kouagou’s Please Don’t Be!, Bambi van Balen’s Delegation of Slippery Affairs, and Marta Ziólek’s Alluring Mermaids. In addition, a selection of nine large-scale works—all by women artists—serves as a preview of MSN Warsaw’s first collection showcase, which will take place in February 2025. The curation communicates a willingness to contend with the country’s Soviet past, as well as its capitalist present and future, positioning modernism as a framework to be both celebrated and skeptically considered. Over time, Poland has evolved to become a significant political and economic center between the East and West, especially since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which prompted Poland to take in upwards of one million Ukrainian refugees. The museum not only brings a strong representation of Ukrainian women artists—its initial selection of ambitious works solely by women is a strong message of the ideological path it plans to take.
Sandra Mujinga’s monumental synthetic-fabric installation Ghosting, 2019, corresponds with the equally disembodied Monumental Composition, 1973–75, by Magdalena Abakanowicz, one of the rare world-famous Polish artists who mastered large-format textile art in the 1970s. It is fascinating how these two artists from radically different contexts speak to each other, creating an impression as menacing as it is enticing. My favorite work is perhaps Monika Sosnowska’s Façade, 2013. The piece reconstructs a steel curtain facade of a 1960s modernist building, now squashed and hanging like an extinct creature’s skeleton. The work points to the steady decline of modernism and the Benjaminian “new ruins” left in its wake. Sosnowska’s Façade is fragile and terrifying at once, and serves as a counterpoint to Szapocznikow’s Friendship. The works symbolize a city butchered by ideologies: first the Nazis, then communists, and now capitalists.
The city and its commercial center have been rapidly changing because of a recent influx of capital. The presence of MSN Warsaw will undeniably elevate the area and, perhaps, will slow down the rampant gentrification of the city and keep people in the heart of its urban center. Because of this potential, the museum is as much about Warsaw as it is about art. At the building’s opening, I talked to Andrzej Przywara, the founder of Foksal Gallery Foundation, one of Poland’s most prestigious private galleries. “It’s significant that nothing else—neither commerce nor other arts—could find their place in this unique, prestigious space of the city, and only visual arts are capable of it. It speaks about the current character of the city. We are becoming middle-class, and we have aspirations. Art represents it.”
The opening of MSN Warsaw signals the end of art being pushed to the margins of this city, a sign of prestige, elegance, and prominence. This new era stands in stark contrast to my memories of this place in the 1990s—which used to include a gigantic open-air market with cheap knockoffs from China, a ghastly Cricoland funfair, and a tacky shopping center with heaps of bras and panties—and then in the decades when it was an unofficial parking space for suburban and regional private buses. Art has finally earned its place within the country’s center of commerce, but that place comes at a cost. It has already been reported that on top of the 700-million-zloty (approximately $172 million) construction budget, the museum’s maintenance will cost 20 million zlotys ($5 million) per year—and that doesn’t factor in the costs of loans and exhibitions.
MSN Warsaw is already being criticized for its collaboration with Audi, which is sponsoring the events on the ground floor and using images of cars parked there in its advertisements. The museum will have to find its own footing within the ever-changing reality. This will be a difficult task; the public will want to see the artworks as visible proof of what their tax dollars actually “paid for,” which could hinder the museum’s mission to act as an agora for conflicting points of view, but it could also generate the political and social energy to pave the cultural foundation for a new Warsaw. Whatever we might think after these early days, this is only the beginning.
Agata Pyzik is a writer, critic and author of two books: Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero, 2014) and A Girl and a Gun: a Memoir (Pamoja Press, 2020). She regularly contributes to Artforum, Frieze, The Guardian and many other publications. She currently lives with her husband in Portishead, UK.
