Helene Kröller-Müller
| Helene Kröller-Müller | |
|---|---|
Helene Müller and Anton Kröller, ca. 1888
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| Born |
11 February 1869 Essen, Germany |
| Died | 14 December 1939 (aged 70) Otterlo, The Netherlands |
| Nationality | German |
| Occupation | Art collector and philanthropist |
Helene Kröller-Müller (11 February 1869 – 14 December 1939) was one of the first European women to put together a major art collection and credited as being one of the first collectors to recognise the genius of Vincent van Gogh. She donated her entire collection to the Dutch people, along with her and her husband, Anton Müller's, large forested country estate. Today it is the Kröller-Müller Museum and sculpture garden and Hoge Veluwe National Park, the largest national park in the Netherlands.
She was born Helene Emma Laura Juliane Müller at Essen-Horst, Essen, Germany, into a wealthy industrialist family. Her father, Wilhelm Müller, owned Wm. H. Müller & Co., a prosperous supplier of raw materials to the mining and steel industries. She married Dutch shipping and mining tycoon Anton Kröller in 1888 and used both surnames in accordance with Dutch tradition.
She studied under Henk Bremmer in 1906-1907. As she was one of the wealthiest women in the Netherlands at the time, Bremmer recommended that she form an art collection. In 1907, she began her collection with the painting Train in a Landscape by Paul Gabriël. Subsequently, Helene Kröller-Müller became an avid art collector, and one of the first people to recognise the genius of Vincent van Gogh. She eventually amassed more than 90 van Gogh paintings and 185 drawings, one of the world's largest collections of the artist's work, second only to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. She also bought more than 400 works by Dutch artist Bart van der Leck, but his popularity did not take off like van Gogh's.
Kröller-Müller also collected works by modern artists, such as Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Piet Mondrian, Gino Severini, Joseph Csaky, Auguste Herbin, Georges Valmier, María Blanchard, Léopold Survage and Tobeen. However, Bremmer advised her not to buy A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, which turned out to be an important icon of 20th-century art. She did purchase however Le Chahut by Seurat, another icon in the history of modern art. Also, she steered away from artists of her native Germany, whose work she found "insufficiently authoritative."
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