The Olomouc Art Museum is one of the most important institutions of its kind in the Czech Republic. The museum takes professional care of artworks belonging to the state and the church as well as private works of art from antiquity to contemporary art culture. Museum develops its exhibition, research

and educational activities in three buildings - the Museum of Modern Art and in two Archdiocesan museums, in Olomouc and Kroměříž.

Olomouc Museum of Art currently maintains about 180,000 collection items, from old as well as modern art. The museum’s core collection consists of more than 96,000 objects and is divided by type of art into eleven sub-collections (architecture, artists’ books, photographs, prints, 20th century books, drawings, coins and medals, paintings, sculpture, applied graphics and applied arts).

A unique specific feature of the sub-collection of drawings is a collection of art brut which is unparalleled in Czech galleries and museums in its scope and quality. This collection, which continues to grow, contains over 250 items and provides an image of mainly Czech art brut. This undoubtedly includes the numerous occurrences of spiritist drawings of high aesthetic quality. Almost fifty artists of better-known names, anonymous or less known, are represented in the collection. A large part of the collection consists of works by mediums whose authors were influenced by Spiritism (Adéla Ducháčová, Václav Groul, Vlasta Kodríková, Cecilie Marková, Josef Kotzian). The works of psychotic artists are also represented (Marie Kodovská, Františka Kudelová, Zbyněk Semerák). The collection of solitaire authors such as Anna Zemánková, Karel Havlíček is also significant. Pictures by Anselmo Legnani from Italy complete the profile of the collection. The works of Antonín Řehák and Natálie Schmidtová represent a position tending

towards naive expression. Recently, the collection has also been expanded by art brut artists from Poland.