The museum building is 'suspended' above the city. The white, seemingly from afar, windowless block stands on Kale Hill in the vicinity of the old Ottoman fortress. Warsaw architects took advantage of the natural advantages of the location and created an unusual space, an artistic time capsule from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The museum's warehouses conceal one of the most extensive Polish collections of works of art outside Poland. Works by visual artists, professors and their students donated, like the design of the building, as a gesture of solidarity to the city whose museum resources were annihilated by the earthquake.

Skopje - City of World Solidarity
In the aftermath of the earthquake on 26 July 1963, three quarters of the Macedonian capital's buildings were destroyed. The world rushed to Skopje's aid. After all, the leader of the then Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, had made it a "third way" country, not militarily allied with the forces of the East or the West. In the fullness of the Cold War, Skopje became the place where, under the wing of the UN, professionals and authorities from both antagonised blocs came together in a project to rebuild the city. Experts in various fields flocked to the ruined city; with the help of urban planners, including specialists from the Warsaw Urban Planning Studio, a new city plan, the Skopje MASTER PLAN (1964-1965), was drawn up. More than 80 countries around the world helped the city, and some of them donated public buildings - schools, kindergartens, hospitals, libraries, sports centres.

Museum without a seat
However, there was still a lack of a building to house the ad hoc collection of artworks flowing into the city from all over the world. The response to Skopje's appeal to the world in October 1963, in New York, at the Fourth Congress of the International Association of Visual Arts (L'association internationale des arts plastiques, AIAP) - surprised everyone. For lack of a better location, the incoming artworks were temporarily stored in one of the military hangars erected in the suburbs. In February 1964, a museum was established which, although it had begun its exhibition activities, still had no permanent premises for a long time. Its director, Boris Petkovski, sought to have the museum's design created for Skopje by Le Corbusier himself. However, he refused.

Warsaw "Tigers" creators of the museum in Skopje
In November 1965, during a visit to Skopje by a delegation of the party-government of the Polish People's Republic, a final decision was made by the Polish side to donate to the city a design for a building that would become the headquarters of the Museum of Contemporary Art (the Polish People's Republic ranked among the top ten donor countries).

The national competition of the Association of Polish Architects (SARP) was announced on 9 January 1966. 89 proposals were submitted. It was not to be a monument or mausoleum, but rather "a touch of an optimistic future", as the competition judge, architect Jerzy Hryniewiecki, wrote in the competition report in the monthly magazine Architektura (1966, no. 10). The results were announced on 16 May 1966. The winner was project No. 16 by a team consisting of: Jerzy Mokrzyński, Wacław Kłyszewski and Eugeniusz Wierzbicki, jokingly called 'Tigers' in the community.

The development of the technical documentation for the building lasted until April 1968. Construction started in April 1969 and was financed by the Yugoslavs themselves. The building was built on a square plan with an edge length of 42.5 metres. Built of reinforced concrete, it is protected against seismic movements. Most of the walls are concrete, with the outer walls covered in white marble. Marble floors were also laid on the ground floor.

The museum was ceremonially opened on 13 November 1970, on Skopje's Liberation Day. Since 2014, after a long break due to renovations, the building has been serving visitors again.

Museum project in motion
It is interesting to note that among the competition entries was a design for a building by the eminent Polish-Finnish architect and architectural theorist Oskar Hansen (1922-2005) and his team, although the word 'building' is imprecise and limiting here. The proposal was to create a museum in the form of something like a moving sculpture, formed by several hydraulically moved quasi-parasols. What is a museum of modern art? - Hansen himself asked. After all, nobody knows at all what art will look like in the future. Thus, a museum-laboratory, a "museum of infinite possibilities", was - in his opinion - a perfectly legitimate idea. Much more so than the "storage room for hanging works" known from the past.

Donated collection
The worldwide collection of works for Skopje was full of works by artists of the class of Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore. "I am submitting a painting for the Museum in Skopje, oil, format 100 × 60, title Demolished House" - signed Sienicki Jacek. Letters of similar content can be found in a yellowed folder described as 'Donations by Polish visual artists to the Museum of Modern Art in Skopje', stored in the Warsaw Archive of New Records.

This is an incomplete history of four collections carried out at the time 1964-1967 by the Union of Polish Visual Artists (ZPAP) and the Polish National Committee of the International Association of Visual Arts (PKN AIAP; the second collection), which cooperated with it. Both organisations addressed themselves to male and female artists with letters by name. The appeals were successful. In the first collection, by November 1964, works were collected by: Jan Berdyszak, Tadeusz Brzozowski, Józef Gielniak, Benon Liberski, Jerzy Nowosielski, Jerzy Panek or Konrad Srzednicki, among others.

Further gifts flowed into the Warsaw headquarters of ZPAP. Works were sent to Skopje in tranches. The last collection included sculptures and medals, exhibited in September 1967 at the Sculpture Gallery at the eskposition 'Sculpture. An exhibition of donations to Skopje'. These included works by Bronisław Chromy, Władysław Frycz, Józef Kandefer, Stanisław Kulon, Ludwika Nitschowa, Tadeusz Sieklucki, Karol Tchorek and Stanisław Wakulinski, among others.

Today, the collection, created as a gesture of solidarity, comprises over 200 works by more than 130 Polish artists. It is one of the most numerous "national" collections in the Skopje museum.

Information update

In 2015, on the initiative of the Polish Embassy in Skopje, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Museum of Art in Łódź, a project was launched to inventory, analyse and conserve this valuable collection. Magdalena Ziolkowska, an art historian and curator, participated in the research and together with her team reviewed and documented more than 100 works. Many of these works were created between 1965 and 1967 and were donated by the artists themselves. The works often bear dedications on the back. Although they have been kept in storage for decades, their artistic and historical value is immense. They reflect not only individual styles, but also the spirit of the post-war avant-garde and the tension between tradition and modernity, art and technology.

As Magdalena Ziolkowska emphasised in an interview published on the pages of Contemporary Lynx , the Polish collection not only documents an important moment in the history of European art, and thanks to new research and international cooperation, these forgotten works have a chance to re-emerge in the consciousness of viewers - as a testimony to an era, talent and ideas.

As part of her documentation work, Magdalena Ziółkowska played a key role in developing and analysing the collection of Polish art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. Her work included identifying the works, assessing their state of preservation and preparing a catalogue to serve as both a source of historical knowledge and a starting point for further curatorial and conservation activities.

In 2019, the International Cultural Centre in Krakow hosted an exhibition entitled. 'Skopje. City, Architecture and the Art of Solidarity', which showed not only the artistic, but also the urban-architectural dimension of Poland's assistance to the devastated Macedonian capital. Special attention was given to the role of Polish urban planners, whose experience in rebuilding Warsaw after World War II proved invaluable in the reconstruction of Skopje after the disastrous earthquake of 26 July 1963. The earthquake destroyed 65 per cent of the city's buildings, leaving more than 200,000 people homeless. In response, the UN organised an extensive relief programme and Skopje was to become a 'monument to human solidarity'. As early as April 1964, the Skopje authorities proposed the preparation of an alternative urban plan by a Polish team, to complement the work of the Greek-Yugoslav Doxiadis office. A special working group was set up in Warsaw, with Stanisław "Agaton" Jankowski, an architect, soldier in the Home Army and participant in the Warsaw Uprising, as its head. The team included: Adolf Ciborowski - coordinator on behalf of the UN, formerly chief architect of Warsaw, Stanisław "Orsza" Broniewski - one of the leaders of the Grey Ranks, Bohdan Jastrzębski - later chief architect of Warsaw, Kazimierz Marczewski, Juliusz Wilski - urban planners, and experts such as Maria Redziejowska, Wojciech Suchorzewski, Zygmunt Pióro and others. Work on the plan began with an analysis of social, geographical and technical data. The team proposed three structural models for the city (Z, R, S), analysing their economic and functional consequences. In the end, a monocentric model was adopted with a four-tier hierarchy of service centres, a balanced residential, industrial and recreational structure. The following were also taken into account: seismic conditions (e.g. undeveloped zones on the Vardar River), social needs (sociological studies), engineering innovations (e.g. 'Warsaw optimisation', an early form of cost-benefit analysis). The Polish plan received recognition from the UN and the Yugoslav authorities. In 1965, it was officially approved and its results were presented at the exhibition "Skopje of the Future". Moreover, the experience gained in the reconstruction of Skopje resulted in Polish urban planners being invited to work on the reconstruction of the city of Chimbote in Peru after the 1971 earthquake.

Publication accompanying the exhibition at the International Cultural Centre in Krakow

Kinga Nettmann-Multanowska wrote about this aspect of the work of Polish urban planners in the publication " Warszawa rysuje Skopje " . Pavel Veljanoski also published an article on this subject.

On the Google Arts and Culture website there is a virtual exhibition presenting selected works by Polish artists located in Skopje.

List of (partial) artists and works in the collection of the museum in Skopje

Prints and drawings (approximately 111 works, 1965-1967):

Jan Cybis - Góra Kalwarii

Czesław Rzepiński - Still Life

Mieczysław Wejman - Cyclist V

Konrad Srzednicki - Return from a May Day Holiday

Marian Malina - Sitting Figure II

Olga Peczenko - Heads

Jan Tarasin - Collective

Leszek Sobocki - Self-portraits

Barbara Kwaśniewska - graphics (no title)

Painting

Jadwiga Maziarska - Cricot

Ewa Maria Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska - Red Composition

Jerzy Nowosielski

Tadeusz Brzozowski

Alfred Lenica

Jerzy Krawczyk

Tadeusz Dominik

Andrzej Strumiłło

Rajmund Ziemski

Adam Marczyński

Benon Liberski - People and Houses, Działoszyn (1965), Chemostal (1966)

Jan Berdyszak

Zygmunt Kotlarczyk

Danuta Leszczyńska-Kluza

Franciszek Bunsch

Jerzy Rosołowicz - Arrangement with alpha I

Marian Szpakowski - Composition from the cycle Rhythms

Marian Bogusz - Composition 20159

Sculptures

Karol Tchorek - Head

Władysław Frycz - Javelinist

Bronisław Chromy - Hagia Sophia, Sheep

Update compiled. by the editors of the portal, 2024