The Polish art world is waiting for a counter-offensive in the culture war

Just weeks after becoming Poland’s culture minister in 2015, Piotr Glinski began a years-long effort to shift his country’s cultural life to the political right.

He ousted liberal museum directors and replaced them with conservatives. He created new institutions to celebrate traditional culture and nationalist heroes. And along with other lawmakers from his party, Law and Justice, he launched broadsides against films, plays and pop stars that criticized the Roman Catholic Church or the government’s policies on issues including immigration.

Many artists and cultural leaders opposed Glinski’s actions, and there were protests throughout his tenure outside the National Museum of Poland after a leader he appointed removed sexually suggestive artwork from the walls.

Pawel Sztarbowski, deputy director of the Powszechny Theater in Warsaw, said Glinski had tried to “return Poland to an imaginary past.”

Now that project may be coming to an end. After opposition parties won a majority of parliamentary seats in the recent general election, Polish cultural figures are calling on what is expected to be a coalition government dominated by centrist parties to reverse Glinski’s agenda. But they are divided over how to do that without political interference in the arts, which they have been protesting against for almost a decade.

Jaroslaw Suchan, former director of the Art Museum in Lodz whose contract was not renewed by the Law and Justice government, said the party had “treated culture as an ideological weapon.” But if a new administration were to simply fire Glinski’s appointees, “they would be repeating the behavior of the previous administration.”

“We have to think about the long term,” Suchan said, rather than retaliating.

More than three weeks after the October 15 elections, it is still uncertain when Law and Justice will resign from his position. Under the country’s constitution, President Andrzej Duda, a Law and Justice ally, has 30 days to ask a party to form a new government, although he has not yet done so. In the power vacuum, Law and Justice supporters have tried to derail the decision by questioning the legitimacy of the vote.

Observers of Polish politics expect that Donald Tusk, the leader of the Civic Coalition, the largest opposition party, will eventually be asked to lead a new government in alliance with several other groups.

Before the vote, the Civic Coalition said in a manifesto that it would abolish “censorship of Polish culture” and ensure that institutions that presented controversial work would keep their subsidies. The party also pledged not to appoint political figures to head cultural organizations, although the manifesto gave no further details. A spokesperson for Civic Coalition did not respond to an interview request.

Current and former museum and theater leaders said in interviews they hoped for more sweeping changes.

The most pressing issue, according to Piotr Rypson, the chairman of the Polish chapter of the International Council of Museums, is the management of three important museums, which he says have been handed over to Law and Justice sympathizers: the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, both in Warsaw, as well as the Museum of Art in Lodz.

Rypson said two of those leaders were “incompetent,” and that the third, Ujazdowski Castle director Piotr Bernatowicz, had exhibited works of art inconsistent with his institution’s traditions. Bernatowicz, whose contract runs until 2027, has organized several exhibitions featuring artists whose work focuses on conservative political pet peeves. He did not respond to email interview requests.

Malgorzata Omilanowska, who was culture minister in a centre-right government before Law and Justice took office, said the three appointees were a “real disgrace” and had marginalized their museums in Poland.

They had also had an impact on Poland’s reputation abroad, she added, not least because they had just helped choose the country’s representative for next year’s Venice Biennale. Their choice, announced on October 31, was the painter Ignacy Czwartos, with a show focused on Polish victims of German and Russian aggression, events often highlighted by Law and Justice. One of the works that he proposes to show in VeniceFor example, Angela Merkel and Vladimir V. Putin will be depicted on either side of a burning swastika.

In an email exchange, Andrzej Biernacki, the current director of the Museum of Art in Lodz, said that the Polish art world was intolerant of artists with conservative views and that its institutions had favored Western artists at the expense of the country’s. That’s why, he said, he has reoriented the museum’s budget toward purchasing works by Polish, rather than international, artists, purchasing or securing as donations nearly 1,000 pieces.

Janusz Janowski, the director of the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, said in an email that he has also shifted his museum’s focus to contemporary Polish art, including by “collaborating with leading artists, even those who may not necessarily connect with the artistic ‘mainstream’. .’”

Janowski and Biernacki both said they would remain in their posts and that their contracts ran until the end of 2025. Biernacki added that if the new administration tried to oust him early it would be against the law.

In an emailed statement, Glinski, the culture minister, said he had simply replaced museum directors when their contracts expired. “There was dramatically little investment in Polish culture” when he came to power, he said, and he had reoriented the country’s institutions to foster a sense of national identity and patriotism – something that “all wise and responsible states”. Ukraine would have been quickly defeated by Russia without its “strong Ukrainian patriotism,” Glinski added.

The bullish statement proudly summarized the past eight years: “The magnitude of our achievements – of this major institutional change in Polish culture – has no precedent, neither in contemporary Polish politics nor in contemporary culture.”

His critics see it differently, but even among those who desire a cultural reset, there are some aspects of Glinski’s tenure that few want to lose. Suchan, the ousted Lodz museum director, said culture was “at the center of politics” under Glinski – a position it never held under liberal governments, for whom it was often an afterthought. The Ministry of Culture’s budget doubled during the eight years that Law and Justice was in power, Suchan added, and Glinski provided funding to set up a host of new institutions, including museums, an opera company and several subsidy providers.

The new coalition government must maintain that funding, Suchan added. If anything, Law and Justice had shown that “culture is not a waste of money,” he said, adding that “culture plays an important role in creating citizens and shaping society.” That, he said, was “one lesson” that everyone in Poland, liberal or conservative, could learn from the past eight years.