Museum of Art (ms1)

The Museum of Art in Łódź, split between two locations (ms1 on Więckowskiego Street and ms2 in Manufaktura), holds one of the finest modern and contemporary art collections in Poland. The ms1 site is the historically important one: it was founded in 1931 and assembled an international collection of avant-garde work that survived the war years against the odds.

The permanent collection runs from Constructivism, Dadaism, and Surrealism through postwar Polish art to recent contemporary work. The building itself — a 19th-century townhouse — is an odd but workable setting for the collection. If you have time for only one cultural stop in Łódź, make it ms1.

things to do museum
A story
In 1931, a group of Polish artists including Władysław Strzemiński had the radical idea of creating a museum that would collect international avant-garde art — not just Polish art. At the time this was almost unheard of in Central Europe. The collection they assembled before and after the Second World War, including works by Picasso, Léger, Arp, and members of the Dutch De Stijl movement, remains one of the most significant repositories of early 20th-century modernism in Poland.