Circus

The circus tent brought together spectators across boundaries of class, age and gender. For artists, its attraction lay not only in spectacle, but also in the independence of its performers, their disregard for convention and their apparent defiance of physical limits.

The exhibition grew from research into the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, whose holdings contain around one hundred objects relating to the circus, alongside the 370 circus posters held by the Poster Museum at Wilanów. Works by artists including Roman Cieślewicz, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Jan Lenica, Leopold Lewicki, Max Liebermann, Jan Młodożeniec, Tymon Niesiołowski, Teresa Pągowska, Pablo Picasso, Henryk Tomaszewski, Witold Wojtkiewicz and Andrzej Wróblewski traced the subject's varied artistic interpretations.