Temporary exhibitions

Japanese woodblock prints from the collection of the National Museum in Krakow

It is with great satisfaction that we invite visitors to an exhibition of the works of Kitagawa Utamaro (1754–1806), one of the greatest masters of Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period (1603–1868).

The exhibition “Transformations. Modernity in the Third Polish Republic” is the last in the “4 x Modernity” series which has been organised at the National Museum in Krakow since 2021. As part of the exhibition, a wide variety of interpretations of modernity are shown in the fields of Polish art, architecture and design, beginning from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and continuing up to the present day. This fourth exhibition will illustrate the phenomenon of the revision of the concept of modernity and its titular transformation, which were contemporaneous with the social, cultural, and political transformations which took place after 1989. A consequence of these transformations was a multiplicity of creative attitudes and a reinterpretation of the code of modernity, which no longer presented a unified and cohesive image yet which brought about a dynamic and diverse polyphony of voices, characteristic of the cultural life of the Third Republic.

The National Museum in Krakow presents in the Józef Czapski Pavilion the early works of the Kapists – members of the group formed in 1923 around Józef Pankiewicz, professor of the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. The influence of the French masters Cézanne and Bonnard is clearly visible in them.