11 September – 13 December 2026

 

Adolph Menzel is often ranked alongside Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich and Max Liebermann as one of the foremost German artists. His oeuvre eludes simple classification. Its development ran parallel to the transformations taking place in nineteenth-century art, from Biedermeier and Romanticism to realism and historicism. He is also regarded as a precursor of Impressionism in Germany. Throughout his life, he closely observed and recorded his surroundings. Nothing escaped his interest: historical events and humble everyday activities, royal ceremonies and labourers at work, sweeping landscapes and an ordinary tree trunk. For Menzel, art was not only a means of representing the world, but also of exploring and understanding it. No wonder his contemporaries wrote of his ‘penetrating gaze from behind his spectacles’. The National Museum in Warsaw holds over 200 prints and 45 drawings by the artist.

 

Thanks to collaboration with the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, as well as the National Museums in Wrocław and Poznań, visitors will be able to see the diversity of Menzel’s paintings, drawings and prints. The exhibition also explores the provenance of the artist’s works held by the NMW, most of which originate from pre-war German collections. Their earlier histories invite broader reflection on the routes by which works of art entered Polish cultural institutions following the border changes of 1945.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Polish-English catalogue and an educational and cultural programme.

Curator: Piotr Borusowski
Cooperation: Ewa Frąckowiak