Making the national museum critical

Authors:

• Piotr Piotrowski

Abstract

At the beginning of 2009, Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and I were offered the opportunity to direct the National Museum in Warsaw.1 The museum was experiencing many difficulties at that time, caused by acute underfunding, chronic overemployment typical for post-communist institutions, and a demonstrable loss of popularity among visitors. We were invited to accept the post after two open competitions had failed. At the first meeting with the board of trustees, we suggested a range of changes to the profile of the museum, the largest fine arts museum in Poland, which was to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2012. At that time, the National Museum in Warsaw was in visible need of a decisive re-invention, and not solely in terms of mere refurbishment. It required – in our opinion – an entirely new strategy which would unlock the enormous potential provided by its diversified collections, its authority, as well as the expertise of the museum's staff, in order to forge new ways of reconnecting with society, repositioning the museum on the map of Warsaw, Poland, as well as on those of Europe and beyond. As the museum was unable to compete with the world's largest museums in terms of its number of ’masterpieces’, the only possibility was to propose an original conception of the museum institution, which would not be reduced to the reproduction of existing western models, but – in contrast – would derive its strength from the specificity of its position on the margins of Europe, challenging and expanding the canon of world cultural heritage. Thus, instead of continuing the traditional model of the ’national’ institution, serving the ’nation’ in the nineteenth-century understanding of the term, our aim was to turn the museum into a critical agent within the public sphere, an institution capable of taking a stance on the key issues in Polish or East European societies, an active actor in a process of developing democracy. Before moving on to discussion of the concept of the critical museum and the ways in which we began turning it into practice, a brief foray into the history of the National Museum in Warsaw is first required.