KAZIMIERZ MALINOWSKI – MUSEUM PROFESSIONAL

Year 2017 marks the 110th birthday anniversary and 40th anniversary of the death of Kazimierz Malinowski. June 2016 marked half a century since he re-took the post of Director of the National Museum in Poznań. The circumstances in question require us to remember an individual who was of great merit to Polish museology and to the National Museum in Poznań. The title of this text paraphrases the title of an article by Kazimierz Malinowski Michał Walicki - museum professional, published in the “Muzealnictwo” magazine and devoted to a renowned art historian and researcher on Gothic art in Poland. Walicki is less known as a museum professional and even less as a mentor to Malinowski himself. However, if one attempted to determine the whole range of the activity of the latter using one word only, the term “museum professional”, rather disregarded today, seems to be the most capacious and adequate. It reminds about Malinowski in some of the most significant aspects of his activity, including the one as: 1/ a museum professional in the strict sense, but also a practician working in a museum and taking part in the life of this environment in the broadest meaning, 2/ a propagator of the social role of museums as institutions open to the general public, 3/ the long-term Director of the National Museum in Poznań, a visionary and a curator of the institution’s new programme. Malinowski was one of a few of the most important figures of the post-war museology in Poland. Today, he is almost entirely forgotten. Almost total absence of this name in today’s museum circles also results from an unsatisfactory state of research into his professional biography. Nevertheless, Malinowski’s activity, even only in the field of museology, as his second major field of activity was conservation, is still to be meticulously analysed. Therefore, many opinions presented below should be treated as suggestions and hypotheses, still to be further verified, given the current state of research. However, his main fields of activity have been roughly, as it may seem, sketched out in this article. They present him as a propagator of the social role of museums – institutions open to the general public, which, in turn, will prove the topicality of Malinowski’s suggestions in comparison with current discussions on museums’ functions.