From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In 1955, with Warsaw still rebuilding after being reduced to rubble during the Second World War, the Soviet Union gave the city a gift. The Palace of Culture and Science, a gargantuan structure of the kind that only an authoritarian regime could have birthed, was designed to Stalin’s tastes by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev and set down on the Plac Defilad in the city centre, whereupon it became the tallest building in the city. Not everyone liked it: derogatory nicknames proliferated, the poet Władysław Broniewski branded it ‘the drunk confectioner’s nightmare’, and there is a famous old Varsovian joke that the best view of Warsaw was from the top of the Palace of Culture and Science, because that was the only place in the city where you couldn’t see it.
Today the palace’s architectural potency is diluted a little by the mass of corporate office blocks, high-rise hotels, shopping malls and golden arches that have sprung up in the surrounding area. As a package, the buildings of central Warsaw embody what the Polish curator Natalia Sielewicz referred to in an essay of 2017 as Poland’s ‘neurotic transition from its communist past to the free-market present’. Yet the palace has not just survived but continues to dominate the skyline – a historical site, a symbol of national hardiness and a communist relic that, whether locals like it or not, seems fated to remain Warsaw’s most recognisable piece of architecture.
Palace of Culture (1953), Wojciech Fangor. Private collection, on loan to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Photo: © Wojciech Fangor Archive/FANGOR Foundation
In October last year, a building that is in almost every way the architectural opposite to the Palace of Culture and Science opened right next door on the Plac Defilad: an elegant white concrete box, designed by the American architect Thomas Phifer, with a thin belt of windows running all the way round its midriff. The building, which cost the city of Warsaw some £145m, houses the city’s Museum of Modern Art (MSN), an institution that was founded in 2005 but has until now been as much a planning committee as a museum, with a scant collection and no permanent home. When I visit in January, the ground floor of the building is open to the public but the galleries have not yet been unveiled; the grand opening is scheduled for late February. But that this building has opened at all could be regarded as a feat of similar magnitude to the construction of the palace.
For MSN, the past decade or so has been a turbulent gestation period that has included rejected architectural designs, wrangling with city-council planning laws and a febrile political climate. Between 2015 and 2023 Poland was governed by Law and Justice (PiS), a right-wing, Catholic nationalist party whose culture ministry was run by Piotr Gliński – a man not shy about involving himself in cultural matters, chiefly by refusing to renew the contracts of progressive museum directors and curators and replacing them with conservatives – and his deputy, Jarosław Sellin, who once pronounced that there is ‘no such thing as modern art’. (Governmental meddling in culture is a tactic that PiS has claimed, not entirely unreasonably, that Poland’s current government is also engaged in: a coalition run by the centrist Donald Tusk has reversed many of the decisions made by PiS regarding cultural institutions since it came to power in 2023.) In 2022 MSN passed a motion to withdraw from government control and be funded solely by Warsaw city council, a decision it then rowed back on a year later when Tusk became prime minister, agreeing a deal in which the city will spend around £5m and the Polish government £3m on the museum each year.
The ground floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, with a view of the double staircase. Photo: Maja Wirkus
But even if MSN is now operating under a regime more sympathetic to its ideals, it remains something of a political football. The liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, has been pushing for the museum to open earlier than planned, one of MSN’s curators, Sebastian Cichocki, tells me, since he sees it as a chance to embellish his mayoral legacy. At the same time, several PiS politicians and other right-wing figures have been publicly declaiming their dissatisfaction with the building. To me, MSN looks like a provocation to the palace, a rejection of its pomposity. But for some of its critics, it is too simple, too boxy, too artificial, too functionalist – and therefore too Soviet. ‘It’s like a block of flats from the ’50s, or a mall from the ’70s,’ Cichocki says, ‘which is actually a good reference point for Phifer, because he’s trying to embed it in the city.’ Its critics ‘wanted something that would erase the Palace of Culture from the cityscape – something Zaha Hadid-like, maybe’. When I speak to the museum’s director, Joanna Mytkowska, she is rather more pithy: ‘We have a lot of haters.’
An article about MSN published in Gazeta Wyborcza in September last year was headlined ‘Don’t say “bunker!”’ – a reference to some aesthetic criticisms of the building. But in this climate one might forgive the curators and management at MSN from adopting a siege mentality and keeping their heads down. In reality, the overriding impression I get from MSN is of an institution sure of its ideals and brushing off the background noise. ‘We are obviously progressive […] we have our values and we are trying to protect them,’ Mytkowska says. ‘But we are trying to be inventive, to find a way of creating a narrative which can be resistant to useless quarrels among politicians.’
Installation view of the opening exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Photo: Alicja Szulc
Much of the work on display at MSN is politically engaged and the curation of the opening exhibition, which pairs objects from the museum’s collection with some loans over four suites of galleries and two floors of the museum, defiantly foregrounds that radicalism. Particularly so in the first section, put together by Cichocki, which he explains is an exploration of politics and propaganda. As a whole, the exhibition indicates the quality of the museum’s collection, which includes painting, sculpture, films, photography and extensive archives of artists – such as the late 20th-century duo KwieKulik – as well as Polish performance art, oral history and more, dating from the 1950s to the present day.
Some 60 per cent of the collection is by Polish artists, but Mytkowska stresses that MSN is an international museum, partly because, she says, ‘the nature of contemporary art’ is often borderless, but also because part of MSN’s mission is to stress that ‘we are all connected’, and to examine what it means to be Polish in the modern era. Political challenges are not just coming from the Polish political situation, Mytkowska says, but a ‘global, universal’ political pressure – the ‘culture wars’ – and the idea that political art, even if it is born out of a specific context, must always acknowledge something wider, is mirrored in much of the work here. Take Wilhelm Sasnal’s chilling painting Polish Border Wall (2023), which restages a government press conference that took place in the Białowieża forest on the Polish-Belarussian border. The meeting was organised by PiS to trumpet its tough stance on immigration and in Sasnal’s depiction, the politicians’ bodies are smeared out as black silhouettes. The setting of the painting is not verdant eastern Poland, however, but an arid landscape. Running through the scene into the distance is a wall that, Cichocki points out, looks like sections of Israel’s West Bank barrier, one of the defining emblems of the occupation and de facto state of apartheid regarding the Palestinian people.
Polish Border Wall (2023), Wilhelm Sasnal. Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Photo: Marek Gardulski; © the artist
As well as politics, the four-part exhibition covers three loose themes: pop culture, spirituality and abstraction, though in truth there is a pleasing intellectual fluidity to the whole venture. The very fact of grouping the show in this way is a political choice in itself, since it foregrounds the theme – the content – of the works as opposed to their artistic qualities. It is a mode that suits this project, the goal of which is not to offer a comprehensive view of modern art from the 1950s to today, but to show off the breadth and depth of the collection, which it does with panache.
Each section takes place in a distinct suite of galleries off the main hall, but the exhibition really begins before we get to the galleries. Ascending the double staircases, pristine white and angular – more M.C. Escher than Sound of Music – towards the top of the building, I find light streaming in through massive windows, which offer an almost hyperreal view of the palace. There, in the hall, is a large bronze statue of two male figures, arm in arm. This is Friendship (1954) by Alina Szapocznikow, one of Poland’s most celebrated 20th-century artists. In the ’50s Szapocznikow had a stint making government-approved socialist realist art: this work shows a Russian soldier and a Polish peasant arm in arm, the Russian gazing on with a chiseled jaw and a look of paternal confidence, the Pole blank-faced. From 1955 to 1992 the sculpture stood proudly in the entrance hall of the Palace of Culture and Science, but when the time came to dismantle it, the movers were unable to squeeze it through the door. To make it fit, they had to pull off the arms and the red flag that the Russian was carrying.
Friendship (1954), Alina Szapocznikow. Private collection, on loan to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Photo: DESA Unicum; © The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris
In its current state, armless, flagless, visibly hollow, the statue is magnificent, a modern-day Ozymandias – ‘our antiquity’, Cichocki quips – that memorialises the fall of the Soviet Union. Polish-Russian relations have, of course, dwindled even further since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and this is accentuated by another work displayed a few metres away from the statue: a flag-like sculpture made by the Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan out of the remnants of a delivery truck that he found shelled to bits in Siverskodonetsk, a city besieged by Russian forces in 2014.
In this way, much of the work in the first section arises from very particular contexts and addresses specific events or injustices. But artfully curated by Cichocki, the works proliferate in meanings, becoming a broad chronicle of the different ways in which art can and might be political. The first work we encounter in the galleries, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s small painting Observer of Spring (2013) shows a woman turned away in seeming surprise at something going on beyond the frame. The title refers to the first stirrings of the American Civil War, but Cichocki sees the work, too, as the Angel of History, turning her face to the past. Throughout the exhibition there is work that is overtly political, other pieces that are quietly so – not least the fascinating Dead Weights (2013) by the Romanian artist Ciprian Mureșan, which is notable for what it doesn’t show rather than what it does. The piece consists of a collection of communist-era sculptures found by the artist in storage at the Cluj-Napoca museum, arranged on a selection of flat wooden boards. These boards, it turns out, are actually two pieces of wood pressed together, and hidden between their two layers are drawings the artist made of imaginative comic book-inspired vignettes. I ask, naively, where these drawings will be exhibited in the room. ‘No, it won’t be visible,’ Cichocki replies defiantly. ‘That’s the work, that’s the finished work – you have to trust me.’
In an essay for Artforum in 2017, Mytkowska wrote about the ‘Black Monday’ protests which swept through Poland, including through the Plac Defilad in Warsaw, the previous year as a response to PiS’s restrictive anti-abortion bill. She argued that with the right enacting misogynistic policies and Polish trade unions failing to respond, women were now at the forefront of left-wing resistance in the country. When I speak to her she tells me about the roster of planned exhibitions that focus on women artists. At MSN, I enter a room and see one of Lubaina Himid’s wry ‘cut-out men’ figures, Pandora’s Box (1981–83), who stands flat against the wall clutching his oversized phallus, which is collaged with words including ‘Porn’, ‘Rape’ and ‘Misery’, to his temple. Next to this hangs David Wojnarowicz’s Just a little bit of the Tin Drum mentality (1984), a cacophonous collage of torn paper and motifs from Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 film, based on Günter Grass’s novel about the rise of fascism, which features an apocalyptic array of images: burning men, a fallen statue head and, at the centre, a globe seeming to spin in front of a US banknote. In a clever curatorial flourish, Himid’s man has his head turned to the left, gormlessly looking straight at Wojnarowicz’s collage; a cartoonish cow on the latter’s work seems to be sticking its tongue out towards Himid’s figure. These two visions of hell seem to confront one another in an unending staring contest, a doom-loop of apocalyptic proportions that situates misogyny and fascism as two sides of the same dollar bill.
Pandora’s Box (1981–83), from the series Cut Out Men by Lubaina Himid. Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Photo: Marta Ejsmont; © the artist
When Phifer was designing the MSN building, he took the inspired decision to insert what he calls ‘city rooms’ among the galleries. Narrow little limbo spaces that visitors have to walk through to get from one gallery to another, these rooms are lined with European ash and contain huge windows that allow a view of the outside. These will be put to use in the coming months, with MSN choreographing public performances on the surrounding streets designed to be visible from within the museum. The rooms lend a feeling of openness and airiness to the whole space, too, that continues throughout much of the exhibition. In one high-ceilinged room hangs one of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s monumental textiles, a shock of black and red fabric that spills down on to the floor as if it were liquid. Elsewhere, what Cichocki describes as a ‘room of mannequins’ is graced by a gaudy sculpture by Cajsa von Zeipel of a gargoyle-ish woman sitting on a blanket, iPhone in one hand and a burger in the other, clad in some kind of lime-green swimming apparatus. It is a grim comment on the warping effects of consumerism that gains potency through a pleasing curatorial accident: the window at the back of the room frames perfectly a massive Uniqlo sign branded on the shopping mall outside.
Mixed in with this maximalism are more unassuming pleasures. In one room, decked out with a glorious tapestry by the Polish Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas and a charred-black sculpture of the pope sitting beside a goat by Mirosław Bałka, is an object that looks like a battered First World War helmet. It’s a work by a little-known artist called Roman Stańczak, an enigmatic figure who in the ’90s went through a period of turning things inside out, before experiencing a religious conversion and disappearing from the art world. This, I am informed, is a kettle, but he also did it with bathtubs, wardrobes and other household objects. It was, Cichocki says, a way of ‘discovering the other side, of preparing himself for death’.
Monumental Composition (1973–75), Magdalena Abakanowicz. Collection of Museum of the Origins of the Polish State, Gniezno, on loan to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Photo: Maja Wirkus
Meanwhile, those involved in MSN have had some 20 years to prepare for this moment. Everyone I speak to stresses how much of a leap into the unknown the project is – Cichocki tells me that the museum’s acquisitions are often about ‘taking a risk’ – but, as I see it, every nook of the building is impeccably considered. Varsovians have their National Gallery and some lively contemporary art spaces scattered around the city, but they have been lacking a proper national museum dedicated to modern art for so long. Now they have an excellent one, right in the heart of Warsaw. And this is just the first step in a process of regeneration on Plac Defilad: a second Phifer-designed building, a large black box that will house a theatre, will open next to MSN in a few years’ time, while the stone paving on the square will be overlaid with a new green space to create what Cichocki refers to as ‘our Central Park’.
On my tour round the museum I spot a small work by Wojciech Fangor, painted in the 1950s, that reimagines the Palace of Culture and Science, coloured sickly yellow and turned upside down, as an intergalactic monstrosity descending on the streets of Warsaw. Now there is a new alien structure in town, and it is already causing a stir. It won’t erase its imposing Soviet neighbour; why would anyone want that, anyway? In time, though, it might prove to be a more hopeful, more enduring emblem of this great city.
Installation view of the opening exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Photo: Alicja Szulc
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.