The Olomouc Museum Of Art

Olomouc Museum of Art, formerly the Gallery of Fine Arts, was founded in April 1951 as part of the Museum of National History in Olomouc. After 1989, it became independent. Now it is developing its public exposition (exhibition, enlightenment) activities in three buildings. Its founder is the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic. The museum manages approximately 91,100 collection items (from the fields of painting, sculpture, drawing, free and applied graphics, photography, applied art and architectural documentation), and it is the third largest institution of its kind in the Czech lands. In addition, moreover, the museum manages another 105,000 collection items of the Archbishopric of Olomouc.

The museum has workplaces in three buildings:

Museum of Modern Art serves expositions and short-term exhibitions of art culture, mostly of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since 2007, preparations have been made for the transformation of this part of the Museum of Art into the Central European Forum Olomouc (SEFO), which is dedicated to Central European art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Part of this professional project is the construction of a new building next to the existing Museum of Modern Art, for which the government provided 593 million crowns in 2019.

Archdiocese Museum of Olomouc in cooperation with the Archbishopric of Olomouc was founded in 1998 as the first museum in the Czech Republic focused on spiritual culture. The part the museum is the Romanesque palace of the Moravian bishops close to the Basilica of St. Wenceslas at the Premyslid Castle in Olomouc. Since 1999, the northern part of the national cultural monument – the former castle – the building of the chapter deanery and its farmyard, has been reconstructed for the needs of the Archdiocesan Museum. The complex was opened to the public on June 1, 2006.

Archdiocese Museum of Kromeriz was (again in cooperation with the Archbishopric of Olomouc) founded on June 20, 2007 as a detached workplace at the Archbishop’s Castle in Kromeriz. It manages the local castle collections – paintings, drawings, graphic arts, coins and medals, musical artifacts, furniture, and books. Kromeriz Castle was declared a national cultural monument in 1995, together with both historical gardens, and in 1998 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage List.

For more information about the Olomouc Region, from which this museum comes, click here and here.