ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is national museums in four Central European capitals: the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Gallery in Prague, the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava and the Hungarian National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Tradition of these museums grounded in the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century puts them in a different position in comparison to museums created since the 1990s, without the ballast of history that is seen in many areas of activity from management to programming. I have identified four fundamental problems contemporary museums face. These are the problems of criticality, management, infrastructure, and transformation. Although the given examples are not museums of modern or contemporary art, but rather those that collect and exhibit art from an historical perspective from antiquity to the present, the issue of contemporary art occupies an important place in each discussion.
