When curator Aneta Szylak was offered the Poznanski Palace, now Lodz's history museum, as a venue for the first Biennale of Polish Art, she insisted on using the entire building, not just the temporary exhibition spaces. Szylak, who had worked in a history museum early in her career, saw it as the perfect setting for a confrontation of art and history. The block-long neo-Baroque pile, which Jewish industrialist and philanthropist Israel Poznanski, Lodz's "King of Cotton," began to ...