'In 1989, we thought we won the battle'

Joanna Mytkowska is the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (since 2007), art critic and historian. She is the co-founder of the famous Foksal Gallery Foundation and curated the Espace 315 space at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale (2005).

Luuk van Middelaar (LvM) Where were you in 1989, at the time of the changes in the spring? How did you experience it? 

Joanna Mytkowska (JM) At that point I was eighteen years old. Politics was very present, not only in my life, but in the life of society as a whole. [By then, there had been] ten years of the fight against communism. Our parents were on strike, some of them were in prison.  …  The first election I could participate in was in the 1990s. … We were extremely naïve, because in 1989 we thought we had won the battle. Of course, we know now that it was just an episode of history. But we thought that the totalitarian system, which was already corrupted and weak in Poland, but still defined our life, was gone, that we were entering this wonderful world, which was called ‘Western’ and ‘liberal’… There was amazing optimism for several years among younger people. We went through a social and political transformation in Poland, with its huge inflation, with huge unemployment, with the dismantling of the whole system. People in their thirties, forties and fifties were probably suffering. There is research on that in Poland.

LvM Were you able to travel a lot?

JM We did not travel so much because, you have to remember, we were very poor. The zloty was extremely weak. We couldn't afford to travel. But we were optimistic about the changes and had this fantasy that we can shape our lives, that we can shape whatever we are involved in. But then a lot of grants appeared, like the Soros Foundation, which was very important for culture in the early nineties, and the Eastern European University in Budapest. There were several possibilities [at that point] to study abroad. Everything opened up in 1989, and step by step [opportunities] were distributed. Still, it was probably only available for a relatively small group, to those who were active, talented, could speak English a bit and whose parents were educated. That was the group who could take advantage of those changes. Not everybody. Most people were probably finding out how to live in the new system. So first it was about knowledge, because we were all educated and grew up in this very protective [communist] state, which we complained about – obviously [about the] economic issues and so on. But everything was organized. No one was prepared to have to look for a job, for instance, because a job was offered to you after university… Those who were used to that had huge difficulties in adapting to the new system. When there’s [suddenly] competition to get a job, and nothing is really regulated, and all these professional areas are organized by the corporations. We [younger generations] have no consciousness [of these issues]. At least, I definitely did not have consciousness of all the difficulties. And inside these big [societal] changes, the artistic world was super small. It was based on old structures, mostly on a network of people interested in art. It was really small. There were very few institutions.

LvM Are you referring to the pre-89 art world?

JM To that time, in 1989. There were official structures, underground structures, of course, but there was no conception, no real reflection on what we were entering into. There was definitely no money in that system and no [art] market. Polish art was very isolated, except for a few classical avant-garde artists, people like Magdalena Abakanowicz and Tadeuzs Kantor. There were no links internationally and very few with the outside world.

LvM What about the venue, the place where we are in the city? The museum had to find its place territorially, which was part of the debate even before it existed. It was already part of the national conversation because of its location. 

JM This location is central in Poland. This place is still called ‘Defilat Square’, but it's going to change its name to ‘Central Square’. Defilat is a Polish name; in English it would be ‘Parade Square’. So it is going to be changed to something more neutral. But this location, as we titled the exhibition in 2014, is the heart of the country. This part of the city was destroyed during the Second World War. From 1953 to 1955, the Palace of Culture was built here. This was a Soviet gift to its dependent state. In several Eastern European countries that were under Soviet influence, this sort of gift – something very visible – was built in the centre of the capital: in Berlin, in Bucharest and also in Warsaw. It was officially named Culture and Science, under Joseph Stalin’s name until 1956 when Stalin was denounced by Khrushchev for the crimes committed during the Stalin era. But when it opened, this building was named after Josef Stalin, a heavy symbol of Soviet domination. As part of the opening of this palace, a Festival of International Youth was held with delegations from the communist parts of the globe, from Africa, Asia and many other places. … It was a huge celebration, probably one of the biggest in the history of communist Poland. [It included] amazing decorations across the whole city. Social realism was the language for the architecture and design of this building, but this festival in 1955 introduced modern art into communist propaganda, making it a very important moment in Polish culture. So officially, abstract art and international modern art in architecture, sculpture and painting were the language of a communist state. They were an official art, which is obviously very important for the development of the artistic scene. Mostly the reaction, the critique, the opposition to that language, which was perfectly neutral and perfectly abstract without political meaning, came to Defilat Square. In 1989, this square, which is quite big, was also the place for demonstrations, all kinds of demonstrations, such as when the Pope came, and when the Solidarity movement – the opposition to the communist state – started, they demonstrated here. This square could host a million people. And at the last demonstration, before the election in October 2024, there was another demonstration here and on the main street, at which they claim a million people demonstrated against populism.

After 1989, people established a market here. For ten years, more or less, it was a self-organized market … a symbolic icon of that transformation [from communism]. So, the decision to build a museum here was a political decision made by the mayor of Warsaw in the early 2000s. … Poland joined the European Union in 2004 and prospective European funds for developing this kind of investment, for institutions and for buildings, [were available]. Five museums were built to define Polish modernity. … Most of them are very national, such as the Warsaw Rising Museum about the uprising in 1944, one of the most formative events in the history of the city. There is the Museum of Polish Jewish History, the Museum of Polish History – a gigantic museum, more than twice the size of this one – and then there is the history of Polish army, the military museum. We are the last to open. But our location is obviously the best. It was quite a smart idea to have a juxtaposition with the Palace of Culture: an act of defiance. We have a sculpture here that was created for the Palace of Culture in 1954 by the important Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow. She was of Jewish origin, an amazing female artist … one of the best-known Polish contemporary female artists and present in all collections of all the museums of modern art. She started as a hardcore socialism sculptor and received the commission to make a sculpture of Polish–Russian friendship. She shaped it as two soldiers carrying the flag together. For 40 years this sculpture stood in the Palace of Culture. In the nineties we had a very short period of decommunization, when a few monuments were torn down or moved. [Some were torn] down in public, in the presence of crowds, but most of them were just removed to the museum for social-realism sculptures, public sculptures.

[Alina Szapocznikow] died in [1973]… She moved to Paris in the sixties, and as a female, as an immigrant from Eastern Europe, she has no chance of any career. She was completely ignored. She was friends with Pierre Restany and other critics of nouveau realism or whatever was trendy in Paris at that time. She partied with all those people but never proposed a show. So she died unknown. She was rediscovered with the show curated at our museum together with Wiels in Brussels, and then in MoMA in New York in 2010/11. But coming back to that sculpture, it was thrown away. They ordered someone to take it from the Palace of Culture because it was such an evident sign of communism that it couldn't stay in the public space. The person who got the job of taking it away couldn't get the sculpture out through the door, so they cut the arms and the flag off. The sculpture disappeared, and after ten years it was found in a private courtyard by an art historian, and then sold at auction for a huge amount of money. But it's fragmented, it's half destroyed. It looks like a sculpture from antiquity.

LvM Was 1989 a rupture or break, or would you emphasize continuity?

JM It's obviously both. It was definitely a political rupture. It took some time to have evidence of this in artistic production. … It's a very political question in Poland; people who are linked to the Solidarity movement tradition, they would stress that 1989 is a termination, a turning point. But younger people, who are more critical towards how society is organized now, [they ask] what was the social price of the transformation? How much did it destroy in society, … especially in smaller cities. They would rather stress that there's a continuity, that Poland still has a relative equal society because it’s post-communist, that not everything was transformed. They see it as a possible advantage. They are a minority, and they are more intellectual. Real political power, like in communism and the communist period, is not properly taught and researched yet.  Not enough time has passed, and there is a generation that remembers how difficult life was under the communist government, especially during the 1980s, under martial law, so we still don't have a proper perspective on it. But these two factions are very visible [in Poland]. On the one hand, this heroic – which was not so heroic in the end as we know – fight against the communist state. And on the other, the reality of living in a neoliberal society without protection.

Our museum has a more specific history. We are linked to the avant-garde tradition. Avant Garde art was very present, vivid and multi-ethnic in Poland between 1914 and 1939. We have this amazing institution called Museum Sztucki in Lodz, established by artists in 1931. … It is a unique institution with an amazing founding story. The collection still partly exists in the original spaces from 1947, with the original design by Katarzyna Kobro and Wladyslaw Strzeminski. When I started my professional life in an important gallery for Poland, the Foksal Gallery established in 1966, they were continuing this international tradition. They were quite small and also unique at the time. They were always part of a network of international art … They were into conceptual art and so on. In 1989 we were intellectually ready to collaborate and cooperate with the international artistic scene. We had limited contacts with exhibition artists from the Western world. But we faced an economic barrier. There was no concept of the state supporting art production. There was no interest in art production. It was not important, obviously, for the newly organized state and national culture. This tradition of national culture in Poland was at the heart of the interest of the new Ministry of Culture. In the beginning it was still relatively liberal, but after joining the European Union and with all the political tension, elections and so on, it has become the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, which shows the tendency towards supporting national tradition.