Department III - Prints, Drawings and Watercolours
The more recent collection 20th and 21st Century Polish Graphic Art (over 7,000 works) was mostly bequeathed to the museum by Feliks Jasieński, and therefore contains numerous works by artists of the Young Poland movement (e.g. Józef Pankiewicz and Leon Wyczółkowski).
This collection also includes a fine set of works by artists from the third quarter of the 20th century associated with Krakow's artistic milieu.
An equally valuable part of the 20th and 21st Century Foreign Graphic Art collection (almost 4,000 works) are the prints donated by Feliks Jasieński, especially the large group of French graphics which includes works by renowned artists, most notably Pierre Bonnard, Eugène Carrière, Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard. Other countries are represented by equally well-known artists e.g. James Ensor, Max Klinger, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Liebermann, Alfons Mucha, Emil Orlik and James Whistler. A later though also valuable group are the graphics purchased after the International Prints Biennial in Krakow.
Other collections of prints also include valuable iconographic material, for example the collection of Polish and Foreign Woodcut Illustrations, arranged according to individual engravers. These are often used for thematic research.
There is also a separate group named Saints (around 4,800 objects) which includes excellent iconographic and comparative material for the saints, the Virgin Mary, and Christ arranged according to the saints' names and dedications. It is one of the largest specialist collections of its kind in Poland and includes works from the 17th to 19th centuries. As well as numerous prints by Polish artists there are interesting prints from early foreign schools, for example Dutch, German, Italian and French.