Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (40.1999)

4. View of room no. 4
at the exhibition
Warsaw Yestarday,
Today and Tomorow
atthe National Museum
in Warsaw, 1938

mounted under the generał direction of Lorentz, with the individual parts
organised by the Museum and the Departments and Enterprises of the City
Administration. It was greeted with such great interest that the attendance at
the National Museum in the first year it was open reached world records, with
approximately one million visitors.

In keeping with the spirit of the time, Director Lorentz attached great
importance to the MuseunLs educational activity, because that was an area
which only sińce the end of the First World War had begun to elicit wide
interest. Its institutional outline derived from the Service Educatif, organised
in 1923 by the Egyptologist Jean Capart, director of the Musee du
Cinąuantenaire in Brussels, which developed various methods for popularising
culture on the basis of museum collections. At the conference of the Association
des Musees Britaniąues, held in Brussels in 1935, Capart emphasised that an
important task of museums is not only the development of scholarly research,
but also the expansion of education and culture. In the 193 Os problems of
reorganisation and renovation of museum exhibitions, together with the
constant growth of museum collections, were topics of discussion and polemic.
There was even a joint publication, Musees, devoted to them.

The Education Department at the National Museum included among its
responsibilities maintenance of contact with young people, educational

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