Olga Boznańska and… 19th and Early 20th Century Polish Painting from the National Museum in Gdańsk Collection

Duration: 2.08.2025 – 28.03.2027 Venue: Department of Modern Art, Abbot's Palace in Oliwa

The National Museum in Gdańsk is reviewing its storerooms and bringing out works long unseen by our public, accumulated in the collections over decades. We wish to showcase them as part of the “Collection” series – a sequence of temporary exhibitions organized in our various branches. This time, we have the immense pleasure of presenting a priceless collection of painting from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries from the collection of the Department of Modern Art, Abbot's Palace in Oliwa.

The Museum's holdings include a small, yet extraordinary in its artistic layer, collection of Polish painting from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which came here as a result of geopolitical changes. Only after 1945 did the National Museum in Gdańsk (then as the Pomeranian Museum) begin to collect paintings by Polish artists. The first works were gifts from the Ministry of Culture and Art, and these actions had an ideological background – the aim was to create an image of Gdańsk as a Polish city. In this way, a new identity for the city was built, as it were, secondarily complementing its museum resources with the achievements of native female and male artists.

A direct impetus for presenting this collection is also the fact that Olga Boznańska is the Patroness of the year 2025. Our collections could not be without paintings by one of the most important representatives of portrait art and modernism. It is precisely the figure of this outstanding artist and her work that became the direct inspiration for our story about Polish painting at the turn of the centuries.