The National Museum in Warsaw

From medieval African masters to Botticelli, Rembrandt and Picasso, from Egyptian mummies to the most important examples of Polish design, from sacral art to Natalia LL’s feminist Consumer Art… The National Museum in Warsaw is much more than just masterpieces known from school textbooks, although Jan Matejko’s The Battle of Grunwald, Józef Chełmoński’s Storks or Strange Garden by Józef Mehoffer occupy an important place in the collection, which today boasts over 830 thousand works.

The most important of them – representing not just painting or sculpture, but also photography and new media art – are presented in the modernist building located in the centre of Warsaw as well as online, on the Digital NMW website.

The Museum has four branches: the Poster Museum at Wilanów, the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at the Królikarnia Palace (Warsaw), the Museum of Interiors in Otwock Wielki and the Radziwiłł Palace in Nieborów and Romantic Park in Arkadia. They are located in splendid mansions surrounded by picturesque parks.

Since 2012 – the year marking the 150th anniversary of the NMW – subsequent permanent galleries are being thoroughly rearranged in order to present the most valuable works in a modern and friendly setting.

The refurbished Prof. Kazimierz Michałowski’s Faras Gallery was honoured with a number of awards, such as the Grand Prix of the Sybilla 2014 competition for the museum event of the year. The Faras Gallery is the only European exhibition of early Christian Nubian painting.
In it, treasures of a civilization that blossomed over 1500 years ago are accompanied by multimedia exhibits, including a 3D film projection.

The Gallery of Medieval Art offers the most diverse showcase of the artistic heritage of this era in Poland.

The Gallery of 19th Century Art presents flagship works by Polish artists in the context of their European counterparts. The Gallery of 20th and 21st Century Art is the only Warsaw-based display of the artistic output of the last century of that magnitude and calibre.

The new permanent galleries are going to showcase European and Old Polish craft, painting and sculpture (Gallery of Old Art), masterpieces of antiquity (the newly refurbished Gallery of Ancient Art) and the icons of Polish design (Gallery of Design).