As on October 7, 2010 the Board of Trustees rejected my strategy of the development of the National Museum in Warsaw, I am leaving my position of the Museum’s director. I know nothing about the objections that the Board of Trustees raised against my extensive program, since I was not invited to the Board’s meeting.
I would like to remember that after an unsuccessful competition in which I did not take part the Board of Trustees asked me to accept the director’s position on the basis of my program of the Museum’s restructurization presented, at the Board’s request, in November 2008. More comprehensive plans were submitted at the beginning of 2009 and then early in 2010. None of the projects included in those documents caused any controversy. Moreover, on February 25, 2010 the Board made the following resolution: “All the members of the Board of Trustees, one by one, accepted the submitted draft program of the National Museum in Warsaw. The Board decided to approve the document during its next meeting, having obtained the opinions about it from the members absent at the current one” (minutes of the meeting of the Board of Trustees, February 25, 2010). However, the approval never became a fact.
The program proposed by the Director of the National Museum in Warsaw and his team, called in short “critical museum,” is an avant-garde proposal of changes, which gave the Museum a chance not only to bring to an end its long-time crisis, but also to gain a unique position in Europe. Such an approach, aiming to develop a new model of the museum, open to the problems of today’s world, could become an alternative to the present institutions of its kind and make the National Museum in Warsaw not a provincial version of great museums, but an independent, major institution of intellectual culture, competing with commercial tourist attractions. On the other hand, the plan of the Museum’s restructurization (since 1989 it has not been reformed in any significant way) offered a chance to solve its economic and organizational problems. In our opinion, the result could be the rise of an important, modern institution on a European scale.
The Board of Trustees made those plans null and void. Therefore, having no authority to implement my program, I resign from the Museum Director’s position as of October 31, 2010.
Warsaw, October 12, 2010
Prof. Dr Piotr Piotrowski