One Has to Move On with the Living… Adam Asnyk Memorabilia in the NMK collections

There are very few mementoes of Adam Asnyk – a poet, journalist, insurgent, Tatra climber, activist, Member of Parliament and Krakow councillor – preserved in Polish collections. Some of them – such as his oil portrait, ‘addresses’ on the occasion of his namedays – are stored at the National Museum in Krakow, and will be gathered for the first time in one exhibition to be presented to the public.

The exhibition ‘One Has to Move On with the Living… Adam Asnyk Memorabilia in the MNK collections’ will present mementoes of the poet donated to the Museum in 1899 by his son – Włodzimierz Asnyk.

The 120th anniversary of celebrating the 30th jubilee of Asnyk’s creative work, which falls in December 2016, serves as an appropriate occasion to present this collection which consists of e.g. a whole-figure portrait of the poet painted by Aleksy Stażyński in 1886, a silver wreath presented to Asnyk in 1886, an album with 20 photographic landscapes of Kalisz, and several commemorative addresses, diplomas and more than a hundred congratulatory telegrams that Asnyk received on the occasion of his jubilee.

The event constitutes part of a series of small anniversary exhibitions prepared by the Department of Decorative Art and Material Culture, which commemorate the lives of the most outstanding figures in Polish culture (Adam Mickiewicz – 1995, Jadwiga Łuszczewska – 2002, Józef Kraszewski – 2012, Prince Józef Poniatowski – 2013).