Prof. Wojciech Fałkowski has said goodbye to the position of director of the Royal Castle. The Ministry of Culture has announced that the reason for his dismissal was “the irresponsible purchasing policy he has conducted in recent years”. According to the ministry's calculations, the director of the Castle has spent 88 million zlotys from the state budget in the last four years, which is much more than his predecessors.
During a briefing at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the head of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage indicated that the message coming from this meeting is one: “The time has come to change the standards of running cultural institutions”. – I repeat this to you every time, in every interview and at each of our meetings, that public institutions are not and should not be a field for presenting the ego of directors – stated Hanna Wróblewska.
Wróblewska explained that the reason for the earlier dismissal from the position of director of the Royal Castle, Prof. Wojciech Fałkowski was the irresponsible purchasing policy he had been pursuing in recent years. – The purchases covered the years 2018-2024, the largest were made in the last four years – she added.
“The abyss is great”
The Minister of Culture also announced that the Royal Castle spent PLN 88 million from the state budget. – The average purchases made at that time by other heads of institutions was about PLN 20 million, so the gap is huge – she added.
– When it comes to expenditure on such a scale, we would expect as a society, as an office, as a supervisory institution, a very good purchasing strategy, a collection building policy – she said, pointing out that “procedures are the basis for spending public money”.
She added that the procedures for which director Prof. Wojciech Fałkowski was responsible were “at least flimsy”. She said that purchases were mainly made at art fairs, from private dealers. “Sometimes these are works of quite flimsy artistic value, with quite problematic provenance,” she pointed out. As an example, Wróblewska gave the painting “The Finding of Moses” by Dutch artist Jacob van Loo.
Wróblewska emphasized: “Poland as a country has been subject to great destruction for years, we have been devastated by successive wars and tragedies. We have to buy, we have to supplement the collections. However, the way of supplementing the collections should be subject to deep social consideration and expert assessment.”
She explained that as an official, she did not undertake to evaluate Prof. Fałkowski's purchases herself. – Director Fałkowski was asked to present a purchasing strategy for PLN 88 million. The description of this strategy is on two pages, which mentions, among other things, a broad purchasing campaign. (…) This is too little to spend PLN 88 million. Part of this money came from the budget of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and part directly from the Chancellery of the Prime Minister – she specified.
A commission was appointed
The Minister of Culture announced that purchasing policy will be the subject of her next meeting with museum professionals and an internal discussion with them. – Each subsequent purchase should be made in accordance with procedures, for the public good and in accordance with common sense – she emphasized.
Referring to the methods of making purchases by the previous management of the Castle, she said that they were made “based on very poor assessments, not always consistent from an expert perspective”. – We have established an external commission in the ministry, which assessed all past purchases of the Royal Castle made by Professor Fałkowski and those he asked us about this year – she added.
The commission – “external, not official, but composed of experts” – emphasized Wróblewska – assessed that the offer was “random”. The commission rejected it “due to its inadequate artistic rank and unconvincing justification of its connections with the profile of the collections being created”.
– Prof. Fałkowski's purchasing strategy is that one piece of paper which contains, among other things, the following formulations: “The Royal Castle in Warsaw conducts a broad purchasing campaign, but in each case it is carried out according to a pre-defined program with precisely selected goals, which are subordinated to the general program of creating a great museum”. The program was not attached. “A separate, fundamentally important goal is to acquire works of exceptional class for the Gallery of Masterpieces. We primarily buy Italian art, as well as Flemish and Dutch art. We select French works in terms of interior needs and filling in existing gaps. We do not buy German, English or Spanish art, with the exception of El Greco, or possibly Velazquez” – the head of the Ministry of Culture read out.
The symbolic rank of the Royal Castle
She also pointed out that the Royal Castle “is not an ordinary or another museum”. -The Royal Castle should not compete with Wawel or the National Museum. The Royal Castle is a residence of very important symbolic rank, which has its own profile and history. The Royal Castle does not need weak prosthetics, third-rate drawings or second-rate painting. It is an institution in itself and I hope that the director will develop it – she emphasized, giving the floor the new director of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Małgorzata Omilanowska-Kiljańczyk.
– I am coming to the Castle as director nine years after winning the competition for this position. I have the feeling that sometimes it is worth waiting for dreams to come true, and my dream was to become the head of an institution that, in my opinion, is the most important cultural institution in Poland – said Omilanowska-Kiljańczyk.
As she assessed, the Royal Castle is “the Polish embassy in Poland”. – The number of meanings associated with this place: the cradle of Polish parliamentarism, the seat of the rulers of the Republic – all this adds up to a sum that today allows us to be proud (…) of the fact that (the Castle – ed.) was reconstructed, that it was restored to us, Poles – she added.
“My dream is a big exhibition”
– I would like the Castle to be in better technical condition after my term of office. It is indeed younger than many monuments in Poland, but it is also old and we will certainly face a period of difficult renovations (…). I would like the Castle to return to its roots, to once again become a symbol of the royal residence, Polish parliamentarism, a place where the most important events of the state will take place – emphasized the new director of the Royal Castle.
– My dream is a large exhibition that will be part of the “herstory”. I dream of an exhibition about Polish queens, their artistic patronage, investments. Not all queens were deserving, but a few – Cecylia Renata – wife of Władysław IV or Ludwika Maria Gonzaga – wife of Władysław IV Vasa and Jan II Kazimierz were real personalities. I think that the visual story of what they achieved in history will certainly be attractive to viewers from all over Poland, and maybe even Europe – announced her plans Omilanowska-Kiljańczyk.
Main image source: PAP/Rafal Guz