The collection has grown over the years thanks to the contributions of collectors from all over the world, as well as through purchases — especially in the field of Israeli art, whose history is represented comprehensively. In recent years, purchase of contemporary Israeli art has been made possible through the endeavors of the Voting for Art acquisition group.

Most of the works in the collection are from the modern period (the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). It was during this time that drawings and prints shook off their comparative marginal status in traditional art, to become independent modes of expression in their own right, with a wide range of distinctive expressions. The birth of collage in the second decade of the twentieth century, as well the re-evaluation of the potential of work on paper in the latter half of the century, has further informed the work in the field, which is continually revitalized in contemporary art.

A key and unique part of the collection is the compendium of works on paper — drawings, and especially prints — of early twentieth-century German Expressionism. The Dr. Karl Schwarz Collection and the Goeritz Collection, which were donated to the Museum in its early years, and acquisitions from the Hermann Struck Collection, led to the donation of yet another important collection — the Avraham Horodisch Collection from Amsterdam. Dr. Horodisch, a collector and publisher of prints in 1920s Germany, chose the Tel Aviv Museum of Art as a place worthy of preserving his important and rare collection, which includes mainly prints of second-generation (but also first-generation) German Expressionism.

Another important section of the collection is 150 prints by renowned Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, donated by Charles and Evelyn Kramer of New York, comprising a wide variety of the artist’s etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, from the earliest ones that he created in Berlin in the 1890s to those produced in his final years. These cover most of the key motifs and imagery in Munch’s work, in their many variations.

Another important element of the collection is the set of 300 prints and books by Surrealist artists, also donated by Charles and Evelyn Kramer, which highlight the close collaboration between painters, writers, and poets of that movement. Also notable are the donations by Ms. Peggy Guggenheim of works by various Surrealist artists and their successors, and a wide variety of works on paper by European artists from the years 1954–75 from the Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection, both of which greatly enhanced the Museum’s collection. Also of note is the collection of works on paper donated by the Riklis Collection of McRory Corporation, which represents a wide range of geometric abstract trends.