The forgotten metamuseological concepts of Wojciech Gluziński

Abstract

Wojciech Gluziński’s metamuseological concepts, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, found their fullest expression in the book U podstaw muzeologii [On the fundamentals of museology] from 1980. Its author was then considered to be one of the pioneers of museological theory in the world. Nevertheless, he is now almost forgotten. This is evidenced by the latest publications of ICOFOM dealing with the history of twentieth-century museology, which exclude Gluziński. The reason for this lack is the language barrier, which makes it difficult to evaluate his achievements in terms of content. The recognition of this state of affairs was the reason for the preparation of this review article using the methods of analysis and criticism of the literature, for which the basis was sources and studies available only in Polish. The basic questions boiled down to how Gluziński understood the museum and what, according to him, the subject of museology was. The answer to the first question was the concept of a “pure” museum, while to the second, the concept of “museum sense”.