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Food for the Soul: New Cultural Destination: Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art

Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, 2024. (Palace of Culture and Science is in the back.) Photo: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw

By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout

A couple of weeks ago, the city of Warsaw launched a new art museum. A sleek, white-walled Museum of Modern Art, designed by the American architect Thomas Phifer, has been built in the very center of the city, facing the wedding-cake-shaped, socialist-era Palace of Culture and Science. Conceptually, the two buildings could not be farther apart. The Palace of Culture was constructed in the 1950s as a “gift” from the Soviet Union to the newly established Communist regime. Warsaw’s MOMA has emerged in the new Poland, a country that is an independent, democratic state within the European Union.  

Some of the locals have criticized the simplicity of this polished new block, but the strength of new museum will come from its collection and activities rather than its façade. That will not fully take place until February 2025, when Warsaw MOMA will be filled with its modern art collection; until then, the building will host various events, serving the purpose of a new cultural hub as the city’s officials intended. Only a few works of art have been installed so far, but their selection maps quite well the vagaries of the country’s recent political history.

Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Inside view. Photo: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw

In the last 80 years, the city, its artists, and their works have all gone through a painful period of wartime destruction, the Stalinist-era enforcement of a Brutalist style, the long period of “socialist economy” when stores were empty and people reverted to canning vegetables, and the 20th-century counterculture period when many artists refused the realist style favored by party leaders. All of these political and economic upheavals are reflected in the choice of artworks already installed in the nascent museum.

Alina Szapocznikow. Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship (Pomnik Przyjazni Polsko-Radzieckiej), 1954. Bronze. Photo: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw

The story of this unusual sculpture, titled Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship, reflects one of the country’s political changes. A budding sculptress entered this bronze sculpture into a 1953 competition. The statues were to represent two workers, one Polish and one Soviet, arm in arm and carrying a red flag. The sculpture was placed in front of the Palace of Culture until 1992, when it was taken down together with other symbols of the Communist era that Poland was then leaving behind. During many years of storage, the sculpture lost the flag and one arm, and it is now a potent symbol of the changes the country has been through. What is left of the politically mandated “friendship” is a carapace of broken bodies. A further irony is that Szapocznikow (1926-1973) later became one of the most original surrealist and abstract female artists; her most famous works are just the opposite of the Brutalist and realistic style of her early competition work.

Karolina Jabłońska. Sloiki (Jars), 2024. Oil on canvas. Photo: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw

A large oil painting that wraps around a wall, called Jars, has multiple meanings for anyone who lives in Warsaw. On one hand, these jars of pickled vegetables or jams could simply be well-rendered images of canning containers, becoming a modern still life. In Poland, there is a great tradition of canning summer vegetables and fruit, drying mushrooms for soups, and making home-made jams—numerous family households participate in this summer and fall activity. On the other hand, in Warsaw the term “jars” sometimes is used to name (pejoratively) newly arrived inhabitants from smaller cities. These new arrivals work in Warsaw during the week, and on weekends they visit their family homes, sometimes as far as 100 miles outside the capital. They come back to their city apartments laden with home-made jams and pickles; hence the term “jars.” And finally, some of these pickles look suspiciously like anything but vegetables—perhaps this is a slightly macabre metaphor for our compartmentalized and confined lives? A lot of paintings by Karolina Jabłońska, a young female artist from Kraków, express a disturbed view of modern anxieties. In any case, this thoroughly modern artwork deserves a place in the contemporary show.

Magdalena Abakanowicz. Installation view of Monumental Composition, 1973-1975. Sisal, linen, wool, horsehair. Museum of the Origin of the Polish State, Gniezno, as displayed at Warsaw MOMA in 2024. Photo: Nina Heyn

No contemporary art museum would be complete without a textile artwork by Magdalena Abakanowicz. For the Warsaw MOMA opening, the curators brought over one of Abakanowicz’s most spectacular works—swathes of black and orange fabric that fly over the viewers’ heads, heavy with thick yarn and light with swirling fibers at the same time. Abakanowicz was an absolute pioneer in her treatment of textiles as a material for the creation of abstract, tridimensional, contemporary art—all this in the early sixties, when all the other yarn works were just traditional tapestries and weavings. There is really no modern sculpture or mixed-media artist in the world who has not been somehow influenced by Abakanowicz’s vision. Abakanowicz’s textile works are easier to find at London’s Tate than in Warsaw, so this installation, presenting to new generations one of the most original and influential 20th-century artists, is a good sign for the fledgling museum.

Warsaw has many art museums, most of them preserving the country’s 1,000 years of visual history. It is good for the capital to have a new home for more modern offerings that speak to the most recent events, tastes, trends, and ideas, both in art and in life. Warsaw—with its abundance of parks, beautiful buildings, and now a new museum—is definitely a cultural stop to check out.