A new part of the permanent exhibition at the Witold Gombrowicz Museum in Vence, France, was ceremonially opened, enriching the story of the Polish and Argentine periods of the writer’s life. The project was financed with funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage provided to the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw.

The exhibition at the Witold Gombrowicz Museum in Vence was designed by the creators of the museum exhibition at the Gombrowicz Museum in Wsola – a branch of the Museum of Literature in Warsaw. It originally covered three rooms and a corridor of Witold Gombrowicz’s flat, presenting the French, the last stage of the writer’s life. The new rooms enrich the story of the Polish and Argentinian periods in Gombrowicz’s life.

The new part of the exhibition is a modern narrative based on photographs, memorabilia of the writer, quotations and multimedia films. Most of the photographs in the exhibition were taken by Bohdan Paczowski, a Polish architect and friend of the Gombrowiczs family who died in 2017.

The museum dedicated to Witold Gombrowicz was created with the support of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It is currently a facility co-managed by the town of Vence and the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw. It is located in the historic Villa Alexandrine, where the writer lived for the last five years of his life from October 1964 to 25 July 1969. In his place Gombrowicz completed his novel Cosmos and began work on Operetta, as well as continuing the third volume of his Diary.

The exhibition is described in Polish and French. The audio guide also includes information for English-speaking tourists. The Witold Gombrowicz Museum in Vence is open to the public all year round.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński