Department of Prints and Drawings

Since the museum was founded, drawings, watercolours and prints have been collected in parallel with works of painting. Thus, in the early 20th century, Karl Ernst Osthaus, the founder of the Museum Folkwang, acquired not only paintings by Vincent van Gogh but also some drawings by the artist, which still belong to the Department of Prints and Drawings today. In the years that followed, Osthaus devoted himself with great passion to contemporary art, including Expressionism, and here too he was interested not only in paintings and sculptures but also in drawings and prints. When the collection Osthaus founded in Hagen came to Essen in 1922, it was united with the collection of the Essen Art Museum, which its director Ernst Gosebruch had assembled. Gosebruch, who was also interested in works on paper, continued his collecting activities as director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen until 1933, and the museum soon had one of the most important contemporary collections of drawings and prints in Germany. This development came to an abrupt end in 1937, when the National Socialists combed through the German museums in search of supposedly "degenerate" art. Almost 1300 works on paper fall victim to the confiscation in Essen, most of the works are subsequently sold on, some unsaleable ones destroyed.
In the decades following the Second World War, an important focus of the Museum Folkwang's activities is to compensate for the losses suffered by acquiring new works of classical modern art. In the course of time, individual sections of the Department of Prints and Drawings will be expanded in a way that surpasses the pre-war holdings in number and quality. This applies above all to the collection of works of Expressionism, especially the Brücke. In addition, contemporary drawing and graphic art is not neglected: important examples of Pablo Picasso's prints are acquired shortly after their creation, as are several graphic series by Andy Warhol in the novel medium of silkscreen printing. But works by Eastern European artists also enter the collection, often in connection with special exhibitions.
Today, new acquisitions in the Department of Prints and Drawings are primarily aimed at three areas: In addition to supplementing the holdings with selected works of classical modernism and important works from the second half of the 20th century, special attention is paid to contemporary drawings and prints. Even in the digital age, these traditional genres have lost none of their relevance for many artists.