The Irena Hochman and Tadeusz Mysłowski Collection

A display in the hall outside the Gallery of 19th- and 20th-Century Polish Painting at Lublin Castle, one of several dozen gift presentations with which the National Museum in Lublin marks its 120th year. This one draws on prints from a collection that a Lublin-born couple living in New York built over more than half a century. The museum publishes no English text on the jubilee displays, so the quotation below is our translation of its Polish description.

National Museum in Lublin on the exhibition:

The display will include representative examples of contemporary Polish and international printmaking, selected from the 250-object collection donated by Irena Hochman and Tadeusz Mysłowski - an art dealer and an artist from Lublin who made their lives in New York. Gathered over more than half a century, the collection reflects important developments in Polish printmaking and in world art of the 20th and 21st centuries, and in many respects it can be regarded as representative of the main currents of 20th-century art.

What to expect

This is not a show in its own room. The prints hang in a hall on the route through the permanent exhibitions. The museum gives neither the number of works nor the artists, so expect a modest selection rather than a survey of the whole gift.

The museum’s own description of the collection, published in 2021, hints at what might turn up. Among Polish artists it names Henryk Stażewski, Roman Opałka, Jan Lebenstein and Jerzy Nowosielski. From abroad it lists Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Jasper Johns and Sol LeWitt, and among the 20th-century classics Kandinsky, Picasso, Duchamp and Warhol. Which of them are on the wall now, the museum does not say.

The hall leads into the Gallery of 19th- and 20th-Century Polish Painting, which holds a separate display of landscapes by Stanisław Szygell until 1 November 2026. At the same time, the corridor beside the Gallery of Orthodox Icon Painting shows works by Jacek Antoni Zieliński, also until 15 November.

Context

Irena Hochman was born in Lublin in 1947; she is an art dealer and gallery owner who lives in New York. Tadeusz Mysłowski, born in 1943, grew up in Lublin and studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960s. In 1970 he went to New York at Hochman’s invitation and settled there. His work is held by, among others, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Louvre and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In Lublin you can see his work in public: “KrzesłoTron dla Malewicza” (a throne-chair for Malevich) stands at Lublin Airport. Other pieces are at the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures and at the State Museum at Majdanek. In 2017, the 700th anniversary of Lublin’s town charter, the couple gave their print collection to the city through the museum. That year Poland’s culture minister gave Mysłowski his annual award as a patron of culture, and in 2023 the couple became honorary citizens of Lublin.

The gift keeps growing. According to the regional daily “Dziennik Wschodni” (25 July 2026), 250 works entered the permanent collection and close to 1,400 more are on deposit with the museum. Lublin has seen parts of it before: in 2017 in “Tadeusz Mysłowski. Kolekcja grafiki” (a print collection show), and from July 2023 in the poster exhibition “Oblicza plakatu” (Faces of the Poster).

Tickets and time

There is no separate ticket. The museum’s price list does not mention the jubilee displays, and the hall sits on the permanent-exhibitions route, so the permanent-exhibitions ticket, 20 PLN (reduced 15 PLN), gets you in. That is our reading of the location; the museum does not say it in so many words. Tickets are sold in the museum’s online shop (Polish), at the ticket desk and from the machine in the castle courtyard. The combined ticket for the permanent exhibitions, the chapel and the tower costs 40 PLN (reduced 30 PLN) and is sold only at the desk.

Ignore the old dates. As late as June 2026 the museum announced this display for 7 August - 27 September. The current schedule moves it to 2 October - 15 November 2026, and from 20 November the hall goes to a display on images of Lublin by local artists. If you see the summer dates anywhere, they are out of date.

Hours follow the permanent exhibitions in the winter season, which covers the whole run: Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday 9:00-17:00, Friday and Saturday 9:00-18:00. The permanent exhibitions are closed on Mondays. The museum also announces individual days when the Gallery of Polish Painting has reduced hours: it opens late, closes early or shuts at midday, as on 21 October from 12:00 to 14:00. It does not say whether the hall is affected, so check its visitor-information page (Polish) before you set off.

Free admission does not fall on a fixed weekday: the museum lists the free days month by month on the same page. They cover the permanent exhibitions but not the tower.

Allow 15-20 minutes. The display alone is not a reason to climb the castle hill, but it is a good stop on the way into the Polish painting gallery.

English on site: the museum publishes nothing in English about this display and says nothing about English labels. Guided tours of the permanent exhibitions in English are available for groups of up to 30, at 250 PLN per group plus admission, booked at least a week ahead through edukacja@mnwl.pl .

Who it is for: anyone interested in 20th-century prints, geometric abstraction or the story of how a private collection is built, and visitors who saw “Oblicza plakatu” and want another side of the same gift. Who can skip it: a visitor with an hour at the castle who wants the Holy Trinity Chapel and Matejko’s “Union of Lublin”; do not let a hall display crowd those out.

See also

• National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) - the museum profile: the chapel with its 1418 frescoes, the keep and nine permanent exhibitions. One of them is the Gallery of 19th- and 20th-Century Polish Painting, outside which this display hangs.
• Stanisław Szygell - landscapes given by the painter’s widow, in the gallery just past the hall until 1 November 2026; you see both in one walk.
• Jacek Antoni Zieliński - photographs reworked with paint, the artist’s own gift; a display from the same series, also until 15 November 2026.

The full jubilee schedule is on the museum’s jubilee displays page (Polish only), and prices are on its ticket page .

Museum profile: National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) .