The Museum Folkwang owes its reputation to its excellent collection of 19th century and classical modern paintings and sculpture, post-1945 art and photography. The core of this major collection is 19th and 20th century German and French painting. Forerunners of modernism are represented with masterpieces by Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. Also present are German Romantics (C.D. Friedrich, Canus) as well as Courbet, Daumier, Manet and Renoir. The numerous works by German Expressionists and the Blaue Reiter are of unique quality. From the 50’s and 60’s, special mention is due large format American color field painting (Newman, Rothko, Reinhard, Stella) and German Informal Art (Nay, Schumacher, Thieler).

Beyond the paintings and an extensive Graphic Arts collection, a Photographic Collection was founded in 1978 as a further important department of the museum. Today the Painting and Sculpture Collection contains 550 paintings and 250 sculptures, the Graphic Arts Collection ca. 12,000 works on paper, the Photographic Collection more than 50,000 photographs and a number of artists’ estates.

One special aspect of the collection is the large holdings of antique and non-European art and European and non-European crafts from 4000 B.C. to the 19th century, with around 1300 objects. This is still a hidden treasure, only small portions of which have been exhibited up to now.

Also organizationally part the Museum Folkwang is the German Poster Museum whose collection of ca. 340,000 posters is the largest of its kind in Europe. It documents the development of German posters in a European context.