The Kröller-Müller Museum and sculpture garden

 

The 1970s extension

What could be more enticing than a gallery in the middle of a vast wood, where (for the most part) you have to cycle or walk to reach it? What’s more, it has a vast open-air sculpture park, with over 150 objects spread over several acres. Finally, there is a ravishing café with views over the gardens outside. The Kröller-Müller Museum has all of these, plus one of the best collections of Van Gogh.

It turns out that the story of the collection is quite involved. Helene Müller, born in Essen,  married a Dutchman, Anton Kröller, and on her father’s death, he became director of the family iron and coal company (which later includes a shipping line). Helene, Now Kröller-Müller, starts to buy art from 1905 – mainly from the 1870s to the present day, but with a few older works. Between 1909 and1917, the couple buy a vast estate on the  Veluwe. They commission H P Berlage, architect of the fabulous Hague Kunstmuseum, to build a hunting lodge (1915), but their plans for a huge art gallery are never realised. In 1935, the collection was acquired by the Dutch state, while the park became the property of a new Kröller-Müller Foundation. In 1937, a much smaller building than originally envisaged, a “Transitional Museum” was designed by Henry van de Velde (with a sculpture gallery added 1952 with large windows onto the park). This is the older part of the building housing the collection today. Helene died in 1939, and after her death a new focus on collecting sculpture began; the sculpture garden opened in 1961, and includes the ravishing Rietveld Pavilion, a reconstruction of a 1955 work shortly after the architect’s death in 1964. But what the visitor notices first today is the major new wing, by the Dutch architect Wim Quist, finished 1977. However, neither the old nor the new building really provides the space I would expect for such a major collection.

The permanent collection was, like any collection built by an individual, rather subjective. I wouldn’t have had quite so many Van Goghs (he must be the only artist to have painted the potato harvest, hardly the most visually appealing of topics) but the experience of the magical spaces was magical. Coffee and cake while looking at the trees was ravishing. And there was one sculpture room with big windows, enabling both the indoor and outdoor pieces to be seen. To the credit of the trustees who now manage the foundation, the buying policy has continued with a lot of contemporary pieces, to provide discussion, rather than run the risk of the collection being seen as a fossil (apparently, the founder herself thought the collection was complete and would never need expanding).

On visiting, the other thing I noticed was, for a building surrounded so entirely by trees and parkland, it seemed paradoxical and rather unnecessary to have temporary exhibitions (“The Wood for the Trees”) about “conversations with nature” that were filmed in forests in Finland, rather than simply by walking outside the gallery. This doesn’t seem to me to be environmentally necessary – you could have plenty of conversations with nature in the surrounding park, and save the travel.

But why complain? The building was ravishing, the setting was ravishing, and almost unique (The Burrell Collection is the only art gallery in a park that seems similar). After visiting the museum and the sculpture garden, on a wonderfully hot summer day, it seemed the only appropriate thing was to lie on the grass for a few minutes and just enjoy the surroundings, before cycling back to the car park, and back to the real world.