The Main Building of the National Museum in Kraków, located at 3 Maja Avenue 1, was designed by Bolesław Szmidt, Czesław Boratyński, and Edward Kreisler in the 1930s. The monumental façade overlooking the Błonia Park, together with the entrance hall and staircase interiors, has retained the character of modernized Classicism that defines the architects’ original design for the Museum’s headquarters.
The Main Building houses the National Museum in Kraków’s permanent exhibitions, including the 20th + 21st Century Polish Art Gallery, the Gallery of Decorative Arts, and the Gallery of European Art.
The building at 3 Maja Avenue also serves as the Museum’s principal venue for its most important temporary exhibitions. It has hosted some of the landmark exhibitions in the history of Polish museology, including A Self-Portrait of the Poles (1979), Art of the “Sztuka” Circle (1995), Between Giewont and Parnassus, and Images of Death in 19th- and 20th-Century Polish Art (2000). Record-breaking attendance was achieved by exhibitions devoted to Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol, and the French Impressionists, with the latter attracting more than 140,000 visitors.