Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, Kraków

Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie is Poland’s largest museum, founded by Kraków’s city council in 1879. Its Main Building, completed in 1992 after wartime interruption, holds a major collection of Polish art and a twentieth-century gallery featuring Stanisław Wyspiański. The institution’s collections are also distributed among divisions across Kraków.

The building before you is the Main Building of Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, Poland’s largest museum. The institution begins when Kraków’s city council creates it on the seventh of October 1879, first giving it rooms on the upper floor of the Renaissance Cloth Hall in the Main Square. This purpose-built headquarters has a long, interrupted birth: construction starts in 1934, stops during the Second World War, and finally reaches completion in 1992.

Inside lies a collection of about 780,000 objects, spanning classical archaeology through modern art, with Polish painting at its heart. The Main Building’s twentieth-century Polish art gallery brings together painting and sculpture from the late nineteenth century onward, including major works by Stanisław Wyspiański and artists of the interwar, postwar, and contemporary periods. The museum’s history also carries a wound from the German occupation, when its holdings are looted.

Poland recovers many works after the war, but more than a thousand objects remain absent. Among them is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s sixteenth-century painting The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, donated in 1937 and taken during the 1939 invasion. What you see here is therefore not one museum building alone, but the central home of a collection spread across Kraków.