A Warsaw Museum on Museum Island

This marks the beginning of a special exhibition series that will help shape the Alte Nationalgalerie’s program in the coming years: Selected national galleries and museums from around the world will be invited in succession to present art exhibitions in Berlin. In the first edition, InterNationalgalerie#1, the National Museum in Warsaw is the guest with the exhibition Inventing Myths. The show runs from June 18, 2026, to January 13, 2027, and can be viewed on the first exhibition floor.

The National Museum in Warsaw was founded in 1862 and is one of the oldest museums in Poland. At the time, it was the only institution in the city that made art accessible to the public. Today, the museum houses approximately 830,000 works of art by Polish and international artists, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, coins, and design objects.

A few years later, in 1876, William I, King of Prussia and German Emperor, ceremoniously opened the »National Gallery« on Museum Island. The collection was international from the very beginning, with a particular focus on the French avant-garde. At the time of its opening, the foundation of the museum’s collection was the collection of the banker Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener, who had died in 1861 and had bequeathed his artworks to the Prussian king. It consisted of a total of 262 paintings by German and international artists.