MSN Warsaw Opens a New Chapter for Polish Art

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the first permanent institution of its kind in the capital city, sits on a plot known as Plac Defilad, or the intersection of Poland’s present and potential. On one side of the sleek structure is a chrome commercial arcade. On the other side is the Palace of Culture and Science, a Stalinist skyscraper originally dedicated to the Soviet dictator.

Thomas Phifer and Partners, the architects behind this new modern art museum, known as MSN Warsaw, were clear: This building is not like the others. It’s composed of two, white concrete-stacked rectangular forms, with a floating façade free of excess. It lacks the neon light that periodically bathes the palace at night in purple, green, and red, but under the moonlight and precious autumnal sun, MSN Warsaw glows.

The museum was heralded upon its inauguration earlier this October as a sign of change, and it’s true; it’s a new season in Poland. The eight-year rule of the right-wing Law and Justice Party came to an end in 2023, closing a bleak chapter for artistic expression.

“This is a historic moment for Warsaw,” mayor Rafał Trzaskowski told the media, cultural professionals, politicians, and friends of the museum who assembled for the opening. Standing in the sunken theater of the museum lobby, he explained that the ambition of this two-decade-long project was nothing less than the “transformation” of Warsaw. With the museum, the city would get a new center. The world would get a center for Polish modern and contemporary art, which has long been scattered in cultural institutions across Europe and beyond. Understandably, the whole of Warsaw seemingly came to the opening prepared to party.

Founded in 2005 as a nomadic collecting institution, MSN Warsaw will hold more than 1,000 works by Polish and international artists in its first home. Those works will arrive in February, during the second and final stage of the inauguration. This October, the most striking art on view is the building, which is something to behold unto itself.

It rises three stories tall and spans 213,000 square feet. According to the museum’s leadership, each element—from the handrails to the monumental (but movable) steel doors and terrazzo floors—was contributed by Polish craftspeople. The heart of the museum, however, is its staircase, composed of two mirroring flights that diverge at the base only to reunite: M.C. Escher lite. Phifer, the Rome Prize–winning architect behind Glenstone, has a flair for tasteful dramatics.

The staircase opens to a soaring window facing the 44-story Palace of Culture and Science. It’s a bitterly charged sight. The structure was constructed between 1952 and 1955 as an ostensible “gift” from Stalin, who was attempting to consolidate power over postwar Poland through government purges and mass detentions. (The palace was originally dedicated to Stalin, but his name was stripped from the structure as part of the “destalinization” of cultural landmarks in the Soviet Union that began after his death.)

Architecture is a sensitive topic in Warsaw. The city is rich with examples of Renaissance and Gothic architecture—palaces and churches, mostly—but, as Phifer told reporters during the opening weekend, “there is a forgotten legacy of modernism in Warsaw.” The city’s Art Nouveau and Brutalist grandeur has been repeatedly battered, flattened, and obscured by war and occupation. Both the bitterness surrounding a Stalinist relic that dares endure (even repeated campaigns for its demolition) and the protectiveness over Warsaw’s surviving modernist monuments is palpable.

Poland’s present, too, is in a state of recovery. The Law and Justice party’s Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Piotr Gliński, led a purge of museum directors, many of whom were women; he replaced them with party loyalists who had little institutional experience. In one of many examples, Hanna Wróblewska, the well-respected director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, a leading avant-garde institution, was dismissed in favor of Janusz Janowski, a painter who previously voiced disdain for “LGBT ideology” and support for art that promotes Judeo-Christian tradition.

Viewing Poland’s past through the glass, one realizes that MSN Warsaw truly believes in what a contemporary art museum can, at its best, be: a chance to imagine a way out of cultural atrophy.

The galleries continue the ground-floor aesthetic, each tall, bright, and open. The shortest fixed gallery is 13 feet high, and the tallest reaches 25 feet. For the most part, those galleries are currently empty, though some have monumental works installed to tease the completed picture.

Sandra Mujinga, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and now based in Norway, contributed Ghosting (2019), a draconic red faux-leather tent that an Ursula K. Le Guin protagonist might pitch in the galactic wilds. It stands alone in its gallery, and it probably needs the space, not unlike the other pieces on view.

There’s the magnificent installation from Poland’s Magdalena Abakanowicz, which cascades to the floor like two feathering wings, only to melt into maroon runways. Sculptor and poet Cecilia Vicuña has installed red knotted vines suspended from the high ceiling that hang before a sputtering television. In a departure from all the red texture, Ukrainian artist Kateryna Lysovenko has painted yellow and pinkish people directly on the walls. Some are humans, like the nude men embracing; others are mythological creatures. Everyone here, even the birthing mother, seems at peace—for now. Lysovenko’s works, especially those painted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, warn of the precariousness of peacetime.

The Polish art world knows something about that. A cultural war came again for its future, and it again survived. The MSN Warsaw dreams to be the plot Poland’s artists and curators rebuild upon; it’ll get its wish.

“We’ve prepared this all for you,” museum director Joanna Mytkowska told a crowd so dense it reached the back doors, the sidewalk, even the peak of that impressive staircase. “We offer this all to you.”