Avant-garde art display recreations historised: Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź as a referential case?

Jesús Pedro Lorente

doi:10.46284/mkd.2021.9.3.1

Abstract

Museums can no longer pretend to be mere containers of art or other cultural treasures; their fascinating legacy for posterity is definitely not just the respective collection, but also its idiosyncratic articulation and ulterior resignification. This essay surveys sifting trends in the re-staging of modern museographies; but instead of using New York’s MoMA as the obvious paradigm, pride of place is given here to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (Poland). Its original Neoplastic Hall survived only from June 1948 until October 1950; but it was reconstructed ten years later, prefiguring other museographical remakes of avant-garde art displays. Thereafter, it also became, in many ways, a typical example characterising postmodern museological trends. All in all, it could perhaps be discussed nowadays in the light of critical museology as a referential case in the history of heritagised museographies

Highlights

05 Jesús Pedro Lorente: Avant-garde art display recreations historised: Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź as a referential case?
Bartoszewicz Municipal Museum of History and Art, 1932), Archive of the Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź in Łódź, an institution nowadays emblematic of the latest museum policies in many ways. As it is distributed in a triad of buildings, it has appropriately been compared with the Tates in Great Britain and other institutional flagships of ambitious urban revitalisation projects, geographically distributed in separated cultural districts, where the museum is respectively housed in remarkable historic buildings which are all themselves considered architectural landmarks
A distinctive feature which makes it a very special case is the consideration given to a double historical legacy of modernity: the collection of avant-garde art and its museographical layout