Andrzej Wawrzyniak


Andrzej Michał Wawrzyniak is a Polish sailor, diplomat, connoisseur and collector of Oriental art, and Founder, Lifetime Director, and Chief Curator of the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw.
In Indonesia, a country with which he has very close professional and emotional ties, he is known as “Andrzej Nusantara Wawrzyniak”.

Life

Andrzej Wawrzyniak was born on 3 December 1931 in Warsaw. At the age of sixteen he boarded the full-rigged school ship “Dar Pomorza”, then sailed on twelve ships, moving up from being a deck boy to the rank of officer of the Polish Merchant Marine. In the meantime he graduated from the Diplomatic and Consular Faculty of the Foreign Service School in Warsaw, then studied at the Maritime Faculty of the Economic School in Sopot, and at the Social Sciences School in Warsaw. In 1956 he joined the Polish diplomatic service, to be promoted in 1973 to the rank of the Minister Plenipotentiary.
Altogether he spent more than a quarter of a century in Asia amassing a significant collection of ethnographical and artistic objects from various countries.

Indonesian art collection

The largest impact on his life was his diplomatic assignment to Indonesia lasting nearly 9 years during the 1960s. After his return to Poland, he donated his collection, numbering over 3,000 objects, to the Polish State. Prof. Stanisław Lorentz described Andrzej Wawrzyniak's Indonesian collection as “one of the largest private Indonesian collections, exceeding even the Dutch collections which are considered to be the biggest in the world”. On that basis the Nusantara Archipelago Museum was founded in Warsaw in 1973.
Because of its development and continuous enrichments with objects from other regions, in 1976 the Nusantara Archipelago Museum had been transformed and began a new span of life as the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw. Andrzej Wawrzyniak was assigned as its director and curator-in-chief for his lifetime. Today the museum holds a collection of over 20,000 objects from Asia, Australia and Oceania.

Honours and awards

Andrzej Wawrzyniak is as an authority in Oriental studies and has been a member of numerous Polish and international organizations and associations engaged with problems of the region. Among others, he was a member of the Oriental Studies Committee for the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Andrzej Wawrzyniak has been honored with many Polish and foreign distinctions: