Entitled La Pologne rêvée. 100 chefs-d’oeuvre du musée national de Varsovie (A Dream of Poland: 100 Masterpieces from the National Museum in Warsaw), the display offers a representative cross-section of Polish art from 1850 to 1914.
Olga Brzezińska, deputy director of the Warsaw-based Adam Mickiewicz Institute, which co-organized the event, told the media that "the presentation of a wide selection of works from the period of the partitions of Poland ... demonstrates how culture and the arts helped preserve national identity and a sense of spiritual independence."
The painters featured at the exhibition include Jan Matejko, Stanisław Wyspiański and Jacek Malczewski, alongside the likes of Olga Boznańska, Konrad Krzyżanowski, Władysław Podkowiński, Aleksander Gierymski, Julian Fałat and Zofia Stryjeńska.
Agnieszka Lajus, director of the National Museum in Warsaw and the exhibition's curator, said the show also highlights the close cultural ties between Poland and Switzerland.
Many iconic Polish cultural figures spent time in Switzerland during the more than a century when Poland was under foreign rule, until it regained independence in 1918.
Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz once lectured at the University of Lausanne, Nobel Prize-winning writer Henryk Sienkiewicz spent the last two years of his life in Switzerland, and composer Karol Szymanowski died in Lausanne.
Poland regained its independence on November 11, 1918—the day World War I ended—after 123 years of partition by Russia, Austria and Prussia.
The Lausanne exhibition opened on Thursday and runs until November 9.
(mk/gs)