Zachęta and Plac Małachowskiego: Art, Murder and Occupation
Why is it significant?
Walk up to the white building with the columns and the sculptures on its roofline. This is the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, opened in 1900 by the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts.
Key Facts
| Place | Zachęta and Plac Małachowskiego: Art, Murder and Occupation |
|---|---|
| Address | Plac Stanisława Małachowskiego 3, 00-916 Warszawa, Poland |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.23920, 21.01150 |
| Part of Walk | Sixty-Three Days: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, from Krasiński Square to Złota Street |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk up to the white building with the columns and the sculptures on its roofline. This is the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, opened in 1900 by the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. Zachęta means encouragement, and for over a century this has been the place where Polish art is shown, praised and fiercely argued about.
It is also a place where Polish politics bled. On 16 December 1922 the first President of the reborn Polish state, Gabriel Narutowicz, came here to open an exhibition. He had been in office for five days. In one of the galleries, a painter and critic named Eligiusz Niewiadomski shot him dead. The murder followed a vicious nationalist campaign against the new president, and it haunted the young republic for years.
Under German occupation the gallery was given a new purpose: the occupiers turned it into a House of German Culture. Around it, the city was divided by signs reading Nur für Deutsche, only for Germans, on trams, in parks and in the best cafés. Polish universities and secondary schools were closed, so Warsaw taught itself in secret: underground classes met in private flats, and thousands of young people passed exams that officially did not exist. Many of the insurgents of 1944 were those same secret pupils.
Across the square rises the round, domed Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity, designed in the 1770s by Szymon Bogumił Zug. It burned during the siege of 1939 and was ruined again in 1944, and like almost everything you have seen today, it was rebuilt after the war. The gallery itself came out of the war damaged but standing, which makes its walls among the older ones on this walk.
Keep an eye on the pavements and doorways around here: shrapnel scars still pockmark some of the surviving facades in central Warsaw, if you know how to look. From Plac Małachowskiego, walk south down Mazowiecka street to Świętokrzyska and the square with the tall, pale tower on its corner.