Helene Emma Laura Juliane Kröller-Müller (born Müller)

Helene Kröller-Müller was one of the first women to assemble a major collection of Old Masters and modern art. Works in her collection included canvases by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Bart van der Leck, Piet Mondrian, Gino Severini, Léopold Survage, and Diego Rivera, among others. In 1913 she was among the first collectors in Europe to make her holdings accessible to the public.

Born into the wealthy family of industrialist Wilhelm Müller, Kröller-Müller spent her childhood in the Ruhr region of Germany, receiving her early education in Düsseldorf before attending a preparatory boarding school in Brussels in 1895. Although she did not study art until later in her life, she engaged with literature by the German Sturm und Drang writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller as well as their predecessor Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Her wish to attend the university remained unfulfilled because of her father’s resistance.

In 1888, Kröller-Müller married the Dutch entrepreneur Anton Kröller, a suitor whom her father had chosen to aid his ailing mining enterprise. Upon her father’s sudden death in 1889, Kröller became the director of Wm. H. Müller & Co. and moved the headquarters of the family business to The Hague; it soon operated on four continents. The company’s success allowed the Kröllers, who moved from Rotterdam in 1900, to become one of the richest and most influential families in the Netherlands.

Kröller-Müller began her collecting activities in 1907, when she hired her former art appreciation teacher, Hendricus Petrus (known as Henk) Bremmer, as her art advisor. Before enrolling in his course at The Hague, Kröller-Müller had acquired primarily Persian rugs, antique furniture, and ceramics. After a 1911 trip to Hagen, Germany, where she met the German museum founder and philanthropist Karl-Ernst Osthaus, Kröller-Müller was inspired to build a house museum and expand her previously modest holdings. By the end of that year, she assembled about eighty paintings and works on paper, the nucleus of her collection, including the work of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists Henri Fantin-Latour, Paul Gabriel, Isaac Israels, Jean-François Millet, Jan Toorop, van Gogh, and Floris Verster, among others. Her collecting ambitions emerged as much from a desire for spiritual enlightenment, as for social and public recognition.

The collection, which eventually totaled about twelve thousand objects, consisted of the world’s largest assemblage of Van Gogh’s work in private hands. Over the course of three decades, Kröller-Müller acquired well over 250 of the artist’s paintings and drawings; in April 1912, for example, she added no fewer than fifteen Van Gogh paintings to her collection. Of similar significance were her holdings of Van der Leck (472 works). Other exceptional works in the collection were by Gris, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and Seurat, whose Le Chahut (1889‒90; RijksmuseumKröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands) she purchased at the sequestration sale of Richard Goetz’s collection at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in February 1922. Kröller-Müller acquired these and other artworks with the financial support of her husband. The couple frequently traveled together to Berlin and Amsterdam, patronized numerous Dutch and French auction houses such as that of Frederik Muller, and bought from trusted dealers in Paris, such as Léonce Rosenberg.

From September 1913 through November 1933, Kröller-Müller shared rotating exhibitions from her collection with the public in a building next to Wm. H. Müller & Co. in The Hague. Those who wished to visit were asked to submit a written application. During this period, Kröller-Müller also wrote a primer on how to view modern art, which was published in Dutch and German. She also became a frequent lender to exhibitions in and outside of the Netherlands.

In 1935, Kröller-Müller and her husband gifted their entire collection to the Dutch state. Prior to that gift, in 1928, Kröller-Müller and her husband established the Kröller-Müller Foundation and initiated numerous, albeit unrealized, building projects for a future museum involving the architects Peter Behrens, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Hendrik Petrus Berlage, among others. Eventually, the museum—erected in the Hoge Veluwe National Park in Otterlo, the Netherlands—opened in 1938 in a building designed by the Belgian painter, designer, and architect Henry van der Velde. Kröller-Müller, who oversaw her collection’s initial installation at the museum, died the following year.