Museum was established on 28 March 1947 as the State Museum in process of organization, on 11 July 1948 it was officially inaugurated to the public. From the 1 January 1950 Museum became a central museum of the Silesia region, as the Silesian Museum, to which museums of Wroclaw and Opole voivodeships were subordinated. It was appointed to the rank of the National Museum on 21 November 1970. The oldest collections come from previous German museums and certain sacral objects of Wroclaw and the Lower Silesia, as well as from Lvov collections conveyed to Poland in 1946 by the then Ukrainian authorities. Subsequently new collections were created, of the Polish contemporary art for instance; those already existing were completed too. The Museum holding encompasses over 120 thousand units of virtually all domains of art, ranging over mediaeval stone and wood sculpture, painting, drawing, prints and crafts, Silesian, Polish and foreign works of art. It houses also documents of Polish culture in Silesia from 19th and 20th century, an accumulation of books art interest and of photography as well as the collection of 20th century art. The Museum collections are displayed on permanent exhibitions.