A Form of Friendship: The Museum on the Square

A subjective, candid, multi-vocal story about the creation of the building of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.   Warsaw’s Parade Square, where the MSN building designed by Thomas Phifer stands, is a unique place and a meaningful context for the Museum. The square, over which the Palace of Culture looms, was Poland’s center of communist state life. Later, it was the arena for the formation of Polish capitalism, with market stalls and gleaming office towers sprouting up around it. This is where fierce land reprivatization disputes erupted, and where newcomers to Warsaw first arrive on trains and buses—including refugees from Ukraine under attack from Russia. Michal Murawski interweaves these threads, pinpointing the “spatio-temporal and infrastructural nexus” in which the new Museum exists, and proposing an institutional  “ideology” to emerge from it. The author’s tour-de-force essay introduces a narrative, further explored through conversations with experts in art, architecture, and activism. A timeline summarizes the complex history of MSN’s new building. The guide throughout this story is Alina Szapocznikow’s 1954 sculpture Friendship, which for almost forty years welcomed those entering the Palace, only to later disappear from view, and now returns, albeit in an amputated form, to the square—in the Museum of Modern Art.