Texts on the permanent collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum | August 2020

TEXTS ON THE PERMANENT COLLECTION OF THE KRÖLLER-MÜLLER MUSEUM This booklet contains information on selected works from the permanent collection.

The numbers next to the works correspond to the numbers in the booklet.

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WELCOME

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Van Gogh gallery

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ROUTE THROUGH THE MUSEUM

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Route through the museum Expo 2 / 3 / 4

Collection Kröller-Müller

Van Gogh gallery Vincent van Gogh. The collection

of Helene and Anton Kröller-Müller

Main entrance

Entrance sculpture garden

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ROUTE THROUGH THE MUSEUM

Van Gogh gallery

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Collection Kröller-Müller Helene Kröller-Müller (Horst, Germany 1869-Otterlo 1939) began collecting art in the early years of the twentieth century. She had vast capital assets at her disposal, stemming from her father’s trading company Wm H. Müller & Co, of which her husband Anton Kröller became director in 1889. With advice from art educator and critic H.P. Bremmer, Helene Kröller-Müller collected almost 11,500 art objects from circa 1907 to 1939: a large collection of paintings, but also drawings, sculpture, delftware, antique earthenware, Chinese art and graphic art.

From early on, she no longer collected purely for herself. She dreamed of a ‘museum-home’ that she wanted to build and donate to the community. This dream accounts for the large scale and the composition of her collection, with which she aimed to provide insight into the development in art from realism to abstraction since circa 1850.

She herself preferred to speak of a development from realism to idealism. Thus, she regarded Jean-François Millet, Jan Weissenbruch, Paul Gabriël, Isaac Israels, George Breitner, Auguste Renoir and Henri Fantin-Latour as realists. To illustrate the development from realism to idealism she acquired paintings

by Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, Georges Seurat and Jan Toorop.

These were followed by the idealists Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Auguste Herbin, Piet Mondriaan and Bart van der Leck. Later she returned to more realistic, neoclassical tendencies with works by Jean Metzinger, Gino Severini and Charley Toorop.

She also acquired several works dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, by artists such as Hans Baldung Grien and Lucas Cranach, whom she regarded as the precursors of the modernists.

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For Helene Kröller-Müller, Vincent van Gogh is superior to all other artists. The exceptionally large number of his works that she acquired forms the core around which her collection is composed. The central position of Van Gogh must also manifest itself in her museum.

In 1938, a year before her death, her dream of leaving behind a monument to culture came true. Her ‘museum-home’ in the Hoge Veluwe, the beginning of the current Kröller-Müller Museum, was opened to the public.

1 JACOPO ROBUSTI TINTORETTO Portrait of a man, 1547 This is the only painting by Tintoretto that Helene Kröller-Müller purchased, but it is also a high point in his earlier work. Tintoretto painted portraits from the start of his career, ostensibly to gain access to the circles of rich Venetian patrons. In order to meet their demands he used the tried and tested image types of his predecessor Titian, who usually depicts his models fully or three-quarters length against a dark background.

This man dressed in black also stands against a dark background, in which the stone balustrade is the only reference to a space. All the attention is focused on the face and on the soft gleaming fur trims, which are rendered with refined colour and lighting effects. Despite the dignified and monumental character, the portrait does not appear to be idealized. The lively gaze of the man, COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER

directed towards the observer, rather seems to give an impression of his personality.

2 LUCAS CRANACH DE OUDE Venus with Amor the honey thief, after 1537 This monumental painting of the goddess Venus and her son Amor has an infectious theme. Little Amor has stolen some honey. He still holds the honeycomb in his hand and angry bees swarm around his head. His mother Venus is teaching him a lesson here: the burning love arrows that he frequently shoots at people sting just as much as the bees and now, for once, he has a taste of his own medicine. The Latin text in the top left corner draws a comparison between a sting and the fleeting joy of love, which is followed by heartache.

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attention is paid to Venus. She is portrayed in a manner typical for Cranach, with lilywhite skin, elongated limbs and a small, delicate face. The gossamer-thin veil serves to emphasize her nudity rather than concealing anything. This kind of depictionof the female nude

by Cranach was already very popular at his time.

3 HANS BALDUNG GRIEN Venus and Amor, 1524-1525 Hans Baldung became an apprenticepainter at the tender age of sixteen andwas thus given the epithet Grien(Greenhorn). Influenced by the Italian renaissance, he painted mythologicalfigures such as this Venus, the Romangoddess of love, beauty and fertility. At her side, her son Amor holds a flaming arrow in his right hand, as a symbol of burning love. He tugs at his mother’s shawl to draw her attention.

Amor is blindfolded and sits on a ball, which represents the truth. If he removed his blindfold he would see the truth and discover that the physical love between people is always subservient to the spiritual love of God. But for Baldung Grien this religious theme was certainly also a reason to actually paint a very carnal Venus: her larger than life-size naked body, further highlighted by the dark background, still makes an overwhelming impression today.

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4 PAUL CÉZANNE La route vers l’étang, c. 1880 At first glance, this seems like a classical landscape, with a winding dirt road that leads through the tall trees, past a field with corn sheaths to a lake. But on closer inspection it becomes apparent that the painting is composed of vigorous horizontal and vertical elements and surfaces. This largely counteracts the traditional perspective, with lines leading to the background and colours gradually fading. The depth effect of the road is interrupted by the horizontal lines of the short bushes, the edge of the water and hills behind. The buildings are placed in the landscape like flat boxes. All this focuses attention on the ‘construction’ of the painting: the forms and surfaces, each with its own colour, applied with forceful, parallel brushstrokes. With this working method, Cézanne was a major influence on modern painting and he set out in a direction that would eventually lead to abstraction.

5 CLAUDE MONET Le bateau-atelier, 1874 In 1841, zinc paint tubes appeared for the first time, making painting in the open air a lot simpler. The paint no longer dried COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER

out so quickly and was easier to carry.

The impressionists took full advantage of this. They left their studios and went painting outdoors, ‘en plein air’.

From 1871 to 1878, Claude Monet lived in Argenteuil, a village on the Seine just outside Paris. Following the example of the painter Charles-François Daubigny, he had a boat built in which he could paint the surroundings from on the water. Thus he was able to depict the effects of light on the water and on the landscape from any convenient spot.

In this painting the boat is moored between two poles, motionless on the water. A figure is vaguely distinguishable in the cabin, probably Monet himself.

The majority of the canvas is occupied by the calm flowing river, in which the boat studio and the trees, but also the sky are reflected. In this painting, Claude Monet gives an impression of the tranquillity on the water during a summer day.

6 CAMILLE PISSARRO L’Arc-en-ciel, Pontoise, 1877 Pissarro was one of the most influential and innovative of the impressionists.

On the advice of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, whom he admired greatly, he began painting landscapes in the vicinity of villages and towns around Paris, such as Pontoise and Montmartre. He was one of Vincent van Gogh’s first admirers and influenced him during his stay in Paris to COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER

start using brighter colours and paint more freely. He himself joined a group of younger artists, such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the eighteen eighties and studied new techniques such as pointillism. Pissarro was fascinated by the effect of light on his subjects. That is evident not only in his paintings of Parisian streets in different weather conditions, such as rainy or foggy, but also in his numerous landscapes. In this work he paints a rainbow over Pontoise, with the unusual light of the sun breaking through after a downpour.

7 PAUL JOSEPH CONSTANTIN GABRIËL Il vient de loin, c. 1887 It comes from afar exudes peace and space. All the lines in this painting lead to a single point on the horizon, which creates enormous depth. The peace is emphasized by the emptiness of the landscape: a few ducks by the water’s edge, a fisherman and a man walking away with a fishing rod in his hand.

And yet, this painting is not just about the depiction of the idyllic atmosphere of a Dutch polder landscape. In the distance, with a heavy plume of smoke, a steam train rumbles towards us. The modern era is suddenly a forceful presence in this timeless landscape. Gabriël is not the only painter fascinated by this new, rapid form of transport. William Turner, Claude Monet and Vincent van 10

Gogh also depict the steam train in the landscape or at the station.

Gabriël is considered one of the Hague School painters. These artists were also called the Dutch impressionists. He is known mainly for his polder landscapes with a windmill, a canal, a few fishermen and high skies. The strictly ordered composition, almost according to mathematical rules, is characteristic for his landscapes, as in this painting.

8 WILLIAM DEGOUVE DE NUNCQUES La maison aveugle, 1892 The orange house is brightly illuminated, but the light source is nowhere to be seen. The curtains are drawn in the downstairs windows, while light shines out of the empty rooms upstairs. The house is partly concealed by trees in full foliage, in contrast to the bare bushes against the house. The bright light on the left betrays the presence of another building, hidden in the darkness.

Nothing is happening in this nocturnal painting, and yet there is tension. A tension that is reinforced by the title. With this work, William Degouve de Nuncques intends to give the observer the feeling that life has come to a standstill: ‘The blind house; that was a case of the silent, sombre nature that held its mirror to my face, and in the mirror I saw emotive life that had foundered in death’.

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of symbolist art, a movement that focuses on the imagination and fantasy. Due to the mysterious and unreal atmosphere that his paintings evoke, Degouve is also considered a precursor of magic realism.

9 ODILON REDON Le cyclope, c. 1914 Odilon Redon is an enthusiastic connoisseur of literature. He draws inspiration from the stories of nineteenth-century writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, but also from Christian sources and stories from antiquity and mythology.

Le cyclope is based on a passage from the Metamorphoses by the Roman writer Ovid. The one eyed cyclops Polyphemus spies on the sleeping Nereid Galatea, but his love remains unrequited. Galatea prefers the handsome shepherd Acis. The enormous eye of the cyclops is the most striking aspect of the painting. For Redon, the eye is often an omniscient, independent being, a symbol of the human soul and of the unknown inner self.

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10 ODILON REDON Pégase et l’hydre, c. 1907 The mythical winged horse Pegasus is a well-known symbol of artistic inspiration. In the many versions of the stallion that he creates, Odilon Redon attempts to capture this symbolism by displaying the power of the animal. In this painting, Pegasus is fighting the Hydra, a manyheaded serpent that sprouts a new head for each one that is chopped off.

The 190 works by Redon in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum were for the most part acquired by Helene Kröller-Müller herself. After 1929 she adds only a few new works, partly due to the financial crisis at Müller & Co, the Kröllers’ family business. Nevertheless, in 1930 she purchases Pégase et l’hydre for ƒ 4,000 from the art dealership d’Audretsch in The Hague.

According to the myth, Pegasus flew to Mount Helicon where the nine muses lived. In the spot where Pegasus struck the ground with his hooves, a sacred spring was brought forth: whoever drank from the spring received the gift of poetry. Pegasus is therefore often used as a symbol for poetic, or more generally, artistic inspiration.

11 ODILON REDON Le paravent rouge (avec Pégase), 1906-1908 Odilon Redon makes this screen for his friend, the collector Andries Bonger.

Redon writes that he found inspiration for it on a journey through the Swiss Alps, due to the sunlight on the mountain peaks. In the almost abstract composition, the winged horse Pegasus can be seen in the upper right corner.

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Van Gogh gallery

VAN GOGH GALLERY

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Vincent van Gogh

The collection of Helene and Anton Kröller-Müller The work of Vincent van Gogh occupies a special place in the collection of Anton and Helene Kröller-Müller, the founders of the Kröller-Müller Museum. Thanks to them, the museum has the second largest Van Gogh collection in the world. In 1908 Helene purchases her first painting by Van Gogh at auction for ƒ 110: Edge of a wood (1883). This is followed by no fewer than 90 paintings and more than 180 works on paper. Their budget is virtually unlimited.

Helene considers Van Gogh to be ‘one of the great spirits of modern art’. In August 1880, when he decides to concentrate on his artistic practice after unsuccessful careers as an art dealer, teacher, theology student and preacher, Van Gogh is 27 years old.

The pastor’s son is convinced that he can also be of service to God as an artist. Helene, herself in search of a spiritual dimension in her life, can identify with the way in which Van Gogh also seeks this in his life: in humankind and in nature.

Since the opening of the Kröller-Müller Museum in 1938, the works of Van Gogh have hung in the heart of the building: a corridor around a small patio, now called the Van Gogh gallery.

In the current arrangement the paintings from Van Gogh’s Dutch and French periods hang side by side, whereby the first half of the circuit focuses on the human figure and the second half on the landscape.

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12 VINCENT VAN GOGH Sorrowing old man, May 1890 On 15 May 1913, Anton gives this painting to Helene for their 25th wedding anniversary, together with Portrait of Eva Callimachi-Catargi by Henri FantinLatour. With these two masterpieces by Helene’s favourite painters, Anton shows his appreciation for his wife and her collection.

During Van Gogh’s stay in Saint-Rémy in the South of France, he conceives a plan to make a series of ‘Reminiscences of the North’ and asks Theo to send to him his old drawings. This painting is based on a drawing from 1882. He ‘translates’ the drawing into colour with contrasting shades of violet and greenish yellow.

13 VINCENT VAN GOGH La Berceuse, December 1888-January 1889 When Anton goes to Paris on a business trip in April 1912, Helene follows later together with Bremmer to ‘hunt for all the best Van Goghs’. On the very first evening in Paris they find La Berceuse. It is ‘the peace with which Van Gogh faced the complexity of things’ that according to Helene shows ‘what was actually the greatness of Van Gogh in his French period.’ For her, that peace is the most VAN GOGH GALLERY

important thing that a work of art can convey.

Augustine Roulin, wife of Joseph Roulin, the postmaster at the station in Arles, is depicted by Van Gogh as a cradle rocker (‘berceuse’). She holds a string, which she uses to rock the cradle of her newborn daughter Marcelle, who is not shown here. Van Gogh is mainly interested in the atmosphere of the painting.

The colours, various tints of green and red, are intended to evoke a feeling of comfort and warmth, like the musical notes of a lullaby.

14 VINCENT VAN GOGH Four sunflowers gone to seed, August-October 1887 Helene Kröller-Müller purchases the painting in 1908, less than a year after her decision to compile a collection of modern painting. It is the second Van Gogh painting for her collection; she acquired Edge of a wood (1883) a few months earlier.

Four sunflowers gone to seed is an unusual painting. Here, Vincent van Gogh does not paint flowers in a vase or pot, no arranged bouquet of different flowers, no surroundings and no background; just a few cut sunflowers gone to seed. The flowers are painted life size and fill the entire canvas.

Not only the combination of warm and cool colours and the swirling 16

brushstrokes in all directions, but also the strange, indefinable space in which the sunflowers are placed, make this painting one of the highlights of his Parisian period.

15 VINCENT VAN GOGH Head of a woman wearing a white cap, November 1884-May 1885 ‘And then there are those women’s heads from these parts with their white caps – it’s difficult but so eternally beautiful’, writes Vincent to Theo from Nuenen in January 1885. He is referring to the contrast between the white bonnet and the darker background.

This painting is one of the many studies of ‘peasants’ heads’ that Van Gogh made in the lead-up to The potato eaters.

16 VINCENT VAN GOGH Head of a man with a pipe, November 1884-May 1885 In Nuenen in particular, Van Gogh is extremely productive. Between December 1883 and November 1885 he makes over five hundred paintings, watercolours, drawings and sketches. More than fifty of the paintings are studies of heads. Helene acquires nine of these, including this 17

head of a man with a pipe, which she purchases for ƒ 1,100 at the auction of the Lodewijk Enthoven collection.

Van Gogh endeavours to improve his technique with this series of heads. It is obvious how he struggles to depict a man facing obliquely to the right. The eyes are at different heights and the knot in the handkerchief is also inaccurate. The pipe hangs at such an angle that the tobacco would fall out.

17 VINCENT VAN GOGH Loom with weaver, April-May 1884 The Kröller-Müller Museum has three paintings in which the subject is a weaver with his loom. In Nuenen, many farmers combine their farm work with weaving activities at home in order to make ends meet. ‘I have seen them weaving in the evening by lamplight, which produces very Rembrandtesque effects’, writes Van Gogh. He attempts to capture the painterly effect of the dimly lit workplaces. He also aims to depict the arduous work of the weavers by endowing the loom with ‘soul and life’: ‘There hasto be an occasional sigh or lament coming from the barrel of sticks’, he writes to Theo. That, for him, is more important than the accurate depiction of the machine itself.

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18 VINCENT VAN GOGH The potato eaters, April-May 1885 After making studies of landscapes, peasants and weavers, Van Gogh feels it is time for his first large painting, which must have the peasant life as its theme: The potato eaters. In a letter to his brother Theo, he describes it as ‘the peasants around a dish of potatoes’.

Van Gogh is unsure whether to paint the family at the table in daylight or by artificial light, but he eventually chooses the latter. He devotes much attention to the effect of the light source. The girl in the foreground is painted as a silhouette, the other figures are somewhat eerily lit.

The potato eaters has a somewhat sketchy character: Van Gogh does not develop it further, as he fears it might lose its liveliness. He considers the final painting (Van Gogh Museum) to be one of his best works. It is without doubt the masterpiece of his Dutch period.

Love for humanity When Van Gogh decides to become an artist in 1880, he seeks mainly to document the hard life of those who have to toil for their living. Initially he works in the Borinage and in Brussels, but in 1881 he returns to his parental home in Brabant. There, the poor peasant population is the subject for many studies. His admiration for the old masters, particularly Rembrandt, leads Van Gogh to paint VAN GOGH GALLERY

the peasants in dark, earthy tints, with strong light-dark contrasts.

His most important example is the French painter Jean-François Millet, whom he regards as the true peasant painter, the artist who ‘reopened our thoughts to see the inhabitant of nature’.

For Van Gogh, the peasant life is a symbol of true faith. He sees the repetitive seasonal work of the peasants as being closely connected with the eternal cycle of life. While the sowers are the harbingers of life, the reapers cut it down again.

In November 1885, Van Gogh goes to Antwerp to study figure drawing at the academy. He finds the study too academic and too traditional and after three months he calls it a day. He travels on to Paris and moves in with his brother Theo.

In the French capital he sees the work of the impressionists with his own eyes.

Their use of bright, vibrant colours and attention for light inspire him to exchange his dark Dutch palette for vivid and light colours.

This is clearly discernible in the portraits that he makes in Arles in the South of France from 1888 onward. Van Gogh is not interested in the traditional portrait, but instead wants to make modern, powerful representations of people. His main interest is in depicting the type of person. He gives these portraits titles such as The cradle rocker (La Berceuse) or The lover.

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19 VINCENT VAN GOGH The sower (after Millet), January 1890 In Van Gogh’s novice years, the French painter Jean-François Millet is his great example. For him, Millet is the true ‘peasant painter’. He makes dozens of drawings and paintings after Millet’s The sower from 1850, not all of which were equally successful. As Van Gogh himself remarks in a letter to his friend and mentor, the painter Anthon van Rappard in 1881: ‘Only in a year or two will I get down to making a sower who is sowing, I agree with you there.’

The theme of the sower also has a religious aspect for Van Gogh: the sowing of the seed on the land represents the sowing of God’s word.

Helene Kröller-Müller purchases the painting in 1909 in Paris, at the same time as Four sunflowers gone to seed.

It is one of her first Van Goghs and it remains one of her favourites.

20 VINCENT VAN GOGH The lover (portrait of Lieutenant Milliet), late September-early October 1888

suit me down to the ground for a painting of lovers’, writes Van Gogh to his brother Theo. Paul-Eugène Milliet is a lieutenant in a Zouave regiment (as indicated by the moon and star in the top right corner) and Van Gogh’s painting and drinking companion in Arles. Milliet takes drawing lessons from Van Gogh for some time and accompanies him on his painting trips. Van Gogh admires his friend’s amorous escapades and in this work he depicts him as the prototype of a lover.

21 VINCENT VAN GOGH L’Arlésienne, February 1890 In Arles, Van Gogh develops a close friendship with Joseph-Michel Ginoux and his wife Marie, the owners of Café de la Gare, where he spends many hours.

In the asylum at Saint-Rémy he paints five virtually identical portraits of Marie, after a drawing that Paul Gauguin made of her over a year earlier. Van Gogh calls the work L’Arlésienne, which makes it clear that he is less interested in making a portrait with a good likeness than in depicting a particular type. Gauguin reacts enthusiastically to one example which he receives as a gift: ‘Very fine and very curious, I like it better than my drawing. Despite your ailing state you have never worked with so much balance‘.

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22 PABLO PICASSO Violon, 1911-1912 Picasso developed cubism together with Georges Braque in the years 1905-1915.

This work is a good example of the so-called analytical cubism. In this, an object from reality, in this case a violin, is dismantled, broken into fragments and shown from all sides. The illusion of natural perspective disappears. Instead of that, an almost two-dimensional structure is created, a network of surfaces side by side and behind each other, separated by lines and shadows. The forms of the object, here shown mainly in the middle of the painting, dissolve into the background, which is similarly broken up into surfaces. The middle also contains the still recognizable parts of the violin, such as the volute on the neck, the strings, the curve of the body and the ‘f shapes’ of the sound holes.

The colours in the painting are not very expressive. All the attention is focused on the formal experiments.

23 ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO Torse de femme, 1914 In the early years of his artistic career, Alexander Archipenko mainly investigates the plastic possibilities of the sculpture and the effects of concave and 21

convex, open and closed forms. For this, he uses a wide variety of materials, such as wood, glass, plaster, metal and papier-mâché. He often paints his sculptures, which he then calls ‘sculpto-paintings’.

After studying in Kiev and Moscow, Archipenko travels to Paris in 1908.

There he studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but develops his art mainly by studying works at the Louvre. Influenced

by Egyptian art and primitive African sculpture, he makes sculptures with highly reduced, geometric shapes, in combination with harmonious, flowing lines.

In this Torso he emphasizes the elegance of the female body. The legs and lower body are disproportionately elongated compared to the upper body. Through an extreme twist of the body on its axis, and by placing one leg in front of the other, he creates an exceptionally graceful sculpture.

24 FERNAND LÉGER La partie de cartes, 1917 Léger began his career as an impressionist painter. When he went to Paris in 1907, he started working in a cubist style, influenced by the work of Cézanne and later Picasso and Braque. Léger combines cubism with the aesthetic of the machine. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that the technological developments of his day would lead to a better future. Léger’s depictions of COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER

people and objects do indeed have something mechanical. The card players in this painting are not people of flesh and blood, but look more like robots with their robust, geometric forms and arms like tubes forged from steel. The repeating elements are reminiscent of the rhythm of a pounding machine. The alternation of small and large coloured areas also lends the painting extra dynamism. Léger derives the theme of the card-playing soldiers from his time in military service during the First World War. He made this painting while convalescing in Paris after a poison gas attack.

25 JACQUES LIPCHITZ Homme assis à la guitare, 1918 The Paris-based Russian-Lithuanian artist Lipchitz initially worked in a realistic style. Influenced by Picasso and Juan Gris among others, he switched over to cubism and rendered organic forms in geometric volumes. From 1914, he created series of cubist sculptures of harlequins, musicians and bathers, which gained him much attention. But a year later he again distanced himself from this road to abstraction. He even destroyed his most radical cubist figures, which he found too far removed from the human form. The tension between figuration and abstraction would occupy him for the rest of his life. This work is part of a large gift donated by his heirs, COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER

consisting of thirty-six larger and smaller plaster works. These fragile studies offer a direct insight into his method of modelling and the way he handled the material. Seated man with a guitar is one of the most monumental and balanced works in the series.

26 PIET MONDRIAAN Tableau no. 1, 1913 Piet Mondriaan is known particularly for his abstract work and his role as a pioneer in the artists’ group De Stijl. His earliest work, however, is naturalistic, in the style of the Hague School and he went through various styles before reaching full abstraction. He became acquainted with cubism via the work of Cézanne, Picasso and Braque and he settled in Paris in 1911. This work shows the influence of the analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque, in which an object is analyzed, broken up into fragments and transformed into a complex structure.

In this painting, composed of surfaces in greys and ochres between black lines, no concrete object is discernible.

Nevertheless, it is probably an abstraction of a tree motif. As with the cubists, the composition is built up from the middle outwards, the forms fade towards the edges. The painting clearly demonstrates how drastically Mondriaan changed direction in Paris.

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27 PIET MONDRIAAN Composition 10 in black and white, 1915

28 PIET MONDRIAAN Composition in colour A, 1917

The First World War broke out while Mondriaan was visiting the Netherlands.

For the time being he was unable to return to his place of residence in Paris.

This forced stay in his native country, far from the French art metropolis, had an effect on his productivity, which fell dramatically. In October 1915 he exhibited his first new works in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, including Composition 10. In this work, lines are used as independent elements; they no longer form rectangular surfaces.

Although every topographical trace has been removed, Mondriaan probably based this work on the pier at Scheveningen; the vertical lines refer to the pier disappearing into the distance, the horizontals to the waves of the sea.

There is no colour. By his own account Mondriaan was initially intending to use colour, but was unable to do so due to lack of time and he found the painting also satisfactory without it. It is the first painting by Mondriaan entirely in black and white.

In this work by Mondriaan, for the first time the colours form tightly delineated rectangles. They do not blend into each other, as in previous paintings. The colours are a muted version of the primary colours: dark flesh-tint, deep blue and dark ochre. The coloured areas are linked in all possible ways, together with one or more black line fragments. Sometimes they are placed side-by-side, sometimes overlapping, with no obvious system.

The result is that the different elements appear to float in an indefinable space.

The white is not a neutral background, but a living component of the painting.

It is just as much a form as the surfaces and lines. From Mondriaan’s letters and other sources, it is known that he used subjects from the visible reality as the basis for his paintings until 1919. But for this work there are no preliminary studies or other indications to suggest that it is based on a specific subject.

29 CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI Le commencement du monde, 1924 Le commencement du monde is a deceptively simple work. On closer inspection, this ‘Brancusi egg’ is

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completely asymmetrical. The sculpture lies on its flatter side. The title encapsulates Brancusi’s entire artistic endeavour.

Unsatisfied with the outward appearance of things, he constantly sought their essence. His quest can easily be traced in a series of recumbent heads.

Tête d’enfant endormi from 1908 still retains the features of his newborn godchild. But Brancusi gradually omits the individual features, as well as the general characteristics of a head, such as the mouth, nose, eyebrows and hair. In Le commencement du monde, everything has been pared down to the shape of an egg, the beginning of life, of the world.

Here, Brancusi has reduced to the core what was already implicit in the head of the newborn baby, which, just like an egg, in all its fragility, contains the entirety of life.

30 CHARLEY TOOROP Self-portrait, 1943-1944 Of all the works in Charley Toorop’s oeuvre, her self-portraits perhaps make the biggest impression. She paints herself strictly and mercilessly, almost always full face or three-quarter view.

Her face appears sculpted, with hard lines and surfaces. Every self-portrait is dominated by the eyes, which she paints disproportionately large and that confer the portrait enormous power.

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War, in which she lost friends and was forced to leave her home and studio.

The pensive gaze and her entire facial expression reflects her state of mind.

The black hat with veil and black coat indicate mourning. Striking amid all the black is the purple flower, possibly intended to symbolize a new beginning.

The painting has a tight composition.

The lines of the mouth, the nose and the wrinkles of the face are taut. With a sharp observation of not only her outward appearance, but also her inner disposition, in this painting Charley Toorop gives an uncompromising depiction of her most essential self.

31 BART VAN DER LECK Composition 1917 no. 3 (leaving the factory), 1917 Leaving time at the factory, the moment when a large group of workers departs the factory and pours into the street, is a theme that fascinated Van der Leck.

He made several paintings and drawings with this theme, from fairly realistic to almost abstract. He made this version during the period when he was part of the artists’ group De Stijl. By using narrow and broad surfaces in black and the primary colours of red, yellow and blue against a white background, he achieved an increasing degree of abstraction.

However, Van der Leck had no wish to let go of reality altogether. And for that reason he eventually left De Stijl. The 24

architecture of the factory is still recognizable in the tight horizontal and vertical elements at the top of this painting: specifically the windows and a chimney.

The smaller staggered blocks in the middle depict the crowd moving forward and the horizontal stripes below them represent the street.

32 BART VAN DER LECK Work at the docks, 1916 In this work, Bart van der Leck uses rigid, schematic shapes and primary colours to evoke a dynamic image of the activity in a large port at the start of the 20th century. A ship is unloaded with a crane and dockworkers carry crates and other goods towards a horse and carriage. A group of passengers stands on the left, and behind them a suitcase is loaded onto the carriage.

Work at the docks is a typical painting for Van der Leck, who usually takes situations and scenes from the everyday life of the working class as his subjects. It is also the first painting in which he uses only the primary colours, red, yellow and blue, along with black and white.

In this case, the theme is also linked to the fact that Van der Leck works as an artist and designer in the service of Müller & Co. from 1914 to 1916. For this transport and trading company, run by Anton Kröller, he designs, among other 25

things, a stained-glass window and a poster for ‘De Batavierlijn’, a scheduled service of the company between Rotterdam and London.

33 OSKAR SCHLEMMER Abstrakte Figur, 1921 Oskar Schlemmer was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer.

From 1920 onward, he played an important role as a teacher at the Bauhaus, a progressive school of art in the German city of Weimar, founded by Walter Gropius and where many well-known artists taught. There, he developed the multidisciplinary course ‘Der Mensch’.

In the human form he saw a measure that could provide a foothold in the disunity of his time. Human figures recur frequently in his art and theatrical designs, as faceless, universal types, with an impersonal but never strictly constructivist depiction. Schlemmer’s forms always have a certain rounding and softness. In Abstrakte Figur, created in the Bauhaus workshops, Schlemmer summarizes his central theme of the abstracted human figure. The sculpture is a synthesis of geometric and organic forms, such as spheres, cylinders and combinations thereof. The work has no front or back; every view is equally important.

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34 GINO SEVERINI La Tour Eiffel, 1913 In 1910 Severini, together with Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla, signed the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (‘Manifest of the Futurist painters’). The group aims to express the Futurist core concept of ‘dynamic sensation’ in painting. Sounds, the noise and even the smell of modern life have to be expressed in the lines, volumes and colours in the painting. The role of the viewer must not be limited to that of the observer; he has to be absorbed and drawn into the spectacle on the canvas.

Unlike his Futurist colleagues, Severini associates the contemporary dynamics not so much with the achievements of modern technology, but more with the sparkling and dynamic dance halls and night clubs of his city of residence, Paris.

But the Eiffel Tower in this painting is a supreme symbol of progress and technological development. Severini combines here parts of the then revolutionary construction with abstract lines, planes and light beams in a spinning carrousel.

35 VILMOS HUSZÁR Vincent, 1915 Huszár establishes himself in 1906 in The Hague, where he becomes acquainted COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER

with art critic H.P. Bremmer. Bremmer, the adviser of contemporaries such as Helene Kröller-Müller, is a great advocate of the work of Vincent van Gogh, who was not well-known then. In 1915 Huszár paints Vincent, as a tribute to Van Gogh who he also admired very much. On the original frame you can still read the title, VINCENT. The painting shows a stylised sunflower, built up of forms in bright blue, green, red, orange and yellow. The whole gives a dynamic impression and shows that Huszár is orienting himself towards the international avant-garde movements of Cubism and Futurism. Shortly after Vincent, Huszár meets Theo van Doesburg and he starts to work in an abstract-geometric style.

In 1917 Huszár is, with Van Doesburg, Piet Mondriaan and Bart van der Leck, one of the founders of De Stijl.

36 UMBERTO BOCCIONI Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio, 1913 (cast in 1972) Boccioni belongs to Italian Futurism, a movement that at the beginning of the twentieth century strove after a radical renewal of culture, based on the dynamics and technology of modern society. In order to express contemporary dynamics in the arts, the Futurists develop the concept of ‘dynamic sensation’, which in practice means striving to represent a moving object at different 26

moments in one single image. Boccioni seeks to create and translate spatially the principles of Futurism. He believes that sculpture must bring things to life by showing their spatial relations and their movement. This work suggests the movements of a human figure in motion through its fluid forms which extend and radiate from the figure. In this highly innovative sculpture, Boccioni created an icon of Futurism.

37 GIACOMO BALLA Volo di rondini, 1913 Before Balla joined the Futurist movement, he was known as a neo-impressionist painter. In 1913, under the motto ‘Balla is dead’ he put up all his ‘old’ paintings for sale. After that, he created series of paintings and drawings of fast motor vehicles and swallows in flight, the two most important themes in which Balla works towards an abstract representation of movement and speed. In contrast to the old, static values, the Futurists associate mobility, speed and dynamics with progress in general. This study of flying swallows, with the background indicating a door, electric wires and the angular line of a roof gutter, was developed later by Balla in a painting that he called Swifts: Paths of Movements + Dynamic Sequences. The recurring movements of the flight of the birds are continued in the static sections, such as the door and roof gutter. The effect can 27

be compared to that of the sequence of separate images in the then new medium of film.

38 GIACOMO BALLA Forme rumore di motocicletta, 1913 Balla is one of the leading figures of Futurism, an originally Italian movement in the early twentieth century which embraced the dynamics and the technology of modern society. The Futurists glorify speed and the noise of cars and other new machines. Balla made Forme rumore di motocicletta after a ride on a motorbike (motocicletta), which was at the time an unprecedented sensation.

The circling bands and lines in the painting evoke the spatial movements of the motorbike: the revolving tyres, the gear wheels and the bike chain. The two white star-shapes which seem to explode out of the gear wheels like metal sparks are the actual ‘forme rumore’: the sounds of the combustion engine and especially the bangs from the exhaust pipe. The yellow and green planes refer to the gardens of the Villa Borghese and the Pincio hill in Rome, which was the backdrop for Balla’s inspirational bike ride.

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39 VINCENT VAN GOGH Still life with a bearded-­ man jar, November 1884April 1885 A few years after the start of his painting career in Mauve’s studio, Van Gogh gives lessons to a group of amateurs. Just as he himself had done, they too begin with the still life. He also paints enthusiastically with them: ‘Last week I painted still lifes day after day with the people’, he writes to Theo in November 1884.

Still life with a bearded-man jar is one of the works created during this period.

Van Gogh is himself still learning and the teaching invigorates him. His students pay him, ‘not in money, though, but by telling them: you must give me tubes of paint. For I want to paint a lot, continually’.

40 VINCENT VAN GOGH Girl in a wood, August 1882

distances between them, so that ‘air’ is introduced into the composition. He uses browns, greens and yellows from his ‘practical palette’. It is very likely that he paints it on his knees. This is apparent from the low perspective, but also because pieces of leaves from the forest floor have become lodged in the paint.

41 VINCENT VAN GOGH Patch of grass, April-June 1887 In Patch of grass, Van Gogh chooses a close-up of a grass field. The high horizon makes it possible to zoom in on every individual blade of grass and flower. He paints them with great detail and refinement. The regularity of his brushstrokes creates a certain rhythm in the painting.

In the hands of Van Gogh, a piece of nature that is usually part of a larger whole thus becomes a subject in itself.

Van Gogh is able to buy his own oil paints for the first time thanks to a financial bonus from his brother Theo. He chooses ‘a practical palette with healthy colours’ that he doesn’t have to mix himself. He also purchases a perspective frame that can be set up on uneven ground. Here he uses this to correctly depict the narrowing of the tree-trunks towards the background and the 29

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Love of nature the countryside than in the city. He finds the modern city-dweller ‘decadent’.

According to him, one should be a ‘country person, even if one is civilized or whatever’. In the city he also seeks rural motifs, such as in Montmartre in Paris, at that time still a partly rural area with vegetable gardens and countless windmills.

During his two-year stay in Paris, Van Gogh discovers that landscape painting has been thoroughly modernized by the impressionists. His view of the landscape also changes due to his admiration for Japanese printmaking. He leaves the hectic Paris behind and heads for the South of France. There he hopes to find ‘the clearness of the atmosphere and the gay colour effects’ of the Japanese prints.

In Provence, where he stays from 1888 to 1889, Van Gogh achieves an unprecedented mastery as a landscape painter.

Even when he falls ill and admits himself to a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, he continues to paint as much as possible. He finds the motifs in his immediate surroundings: the wheat field outside his window, the garden of the hospital, the olive groves, the cypresses and the surrounding hilly landscape.

Van Gogh paints his final masterpieces in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris. On 27 July 1890 he wounds himself with a pistol in a wheat field and dies two days later with Theo at his bedside.

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42 VINCENT VAN GOGH Olive grove, July 1889 If there is one painting that intensely depicts the sweltering heat, the arid land, the crooked, twisting trunks and branches and the atmosphere of an olive grove in the Provence, then it is this work by Vincent van Gogh. ‘There are very beautiful fields of olive trees here, which are grey and silvery in leaf like pollard willows. Then I never tire of the blue sky’, he writes to his mother.

In this nature study, Van Gogh uses longer brushstrokes for the tree trunks, branches and contours. For the majority of the rest of the painting – the ground, the leaves of the olive trees and the sky – he works with short, curved brushstrokes. This makes the air appear to vibrate and the heat in the olive grove is almost palpable. Without painting the sun itself, here he depicts the energy of the sun and the power of nature.

43 VINCENT VAN GOGH Enclosed wheat field with rising sun, late May 1889 In May 1889, after suffering several breakdowns, Van Gogh has himself admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy. Even while in hospital he continues painting as much as possible.

During this one-year period he produces 30

more than a hundred and forty paintings, a large number of drawings in chalk, pencil and reed pen and a series of watercolours. For example, he makes numerous paintings and drawings of the wheat field that he can see from the window of his room on the first floor.

Enclosed wheat field with rising sun is probably the first of this series. The wheat is still partly green and poppies and daisies are in bloom in the front of the field. Van Gogh is thrilled with this view: ‘But what a beautiful land and what beautiful blue and what a sun! And yet I’ve only seen the garden and what I can make out through the window’.

44 VINCENT VAN GOGH The garden of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, May 1889 On 8 May 1889, Vincent van Gogh reports for treatment at the asylum Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy, not far from Arles. The doctor at the asylum suspects that he is suffering from epilepsy and admits him for observation.

Once in the asylum, Van Gogh starts painting again fairly soon.

For The garden of the asylum at SaintRémy he chooses an unusual viewpoint, next to the wall of the hospital. The painting acquires a particularly spatial effect through the path with the stone bench that runs diagonally through the painting. The exuberantly flowering bushes and trees are depicted in a tangle 31

of thickly painted brushstrokes, which are often applied wet-on-wet. Despite the huge variety of shapes and colours, Van Gogh manages to introduce depth and structure in the depiction of the blossoming trees.

45 VINCENT VAN GOGH Tree trunks in the grass, late April 1890 During his Paris period, Vincent van Gogh already painted a forest in a very unusual and original way: not the tall trees and the foliage, but the ground, the base of the trunks and the low vegetation, such as ivy, grass and small plants.

In the asylum garden in southern France, he also made this type of ‘close-up’ of a piece of grassland with flowers and the trunks of two pine trees. He paints with thick and thin lines, solid contours and small circles for the many flowers. The characteristic structure of the rough bark of the two pine trees is rendered almost abstractly, while the grass field with white flowers and the yellow dandelions display a certain sophistication.

By emphasizing the foreground – the trees and the grass – and by using a strong diagonal, he creates, as in many of his paintings, a powerful spatial effect.

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46 VINCENT VAN GOGH Terrace of a café at night (Place du Forum), c. 16 September 1888 More than six months after arriving in Arles in the south of France, Van Gogh paints this terrace of a café by the light of gas lamps. He has set himself the difficult task of making a nocturnal painting without using black. It would become one of the highlights of his oeuvre.

With the abundance of light on the walls and marquise, and with the orange floor, he makes the terrace stand out sharply against the darker blue and green tints of the rest of the painting. The yellow light of the gas lamps intensifies the blue of the starry sky, the first in his oeuvre.

The painting exudes the carefree atmosphere of a sultry summer night.

The fact that Van Gogh paints what he sees is borne out by later astronomical research. He has painted the constellations precisely as they appeared on the night of 16 or 17 September 1888.

47 VINCENT VAN GOGH View of Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer, 1-3 June 1888 In late May 1888, during his stay in Arles, Vincent van Gogh visits the fishing village Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the Mediterranean. He wants to see the sea VAN GOGH GALLERY

again and paint seascapes. There he stays for a few days and in that short period makes nine drawings and a painting of the village itself.

The painting is bathed in the radiant Mediterranean light. Van Gogh paints the sides of the houses facing the sun in warm and light tints, and the shadow sides in blue. A striking feature of the painting is the ‘azure green of the white glowing sky’, as Van Gogh calls it. He writes: ‘[…] the Mediterranean has a colour like mackerel, in other words, changing – you don’t always know if it’s green or purple, you don’t always know if it’s blue, because a second later, its changing reflection has taken on a pink or grey hue’.

48 VINCENT VAN GOGH Interior of a restaurant, summer 1887 The cafés, bars, restaurants and nightclubs of the modern Paris, inhabited by ordinary and eccentric characters, are cherished themes for the impressionists.

This interior of a middle-class restaurant in Paris is a rare example of such a metropolitan theme for Van Gogh. It is not known which restaurant Van Gogh has depicted. Virtually all the restaurants that he visited in Paris have been postulated at one time or other.

Unlike the impressionists, Van Gogh’s restaurant is completely empty. Only the black hat, which hangs unusually 32

high on the wall, suggests some human presence. Van Gogh does not like the hustle and bustle of city life or the city-dwellers, whom he regards as decadent. A little over six months after completing this painting he leaves Paris, in search of peace in the south of France.

49 VINCENT VAN GOGH Cypresses with two figures, June 1889-February 1890 Two women walk amidst a typical Provençal landscape with a blue sky and a row of majestic cypresses. However, this work is not about the women, but about the row of trees behind them: ‘The cypresses still preoccupy me’, writes Van Gogh to his brother Theo, ‘It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has such a distinguished quality.’ He describes the cypress as a dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape. The thick layer of paint with which he renders the trees in this painting reinforces that effect.

Van Gogh only added the two figures later, before giving the painting to the Parisian art critic Albert Aurier, who is the first to write enthusiastically about his work.

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50 VINCENT VAN GOGH Bridge at Arles (Pont de Langlois), mid-March 1888 Helene Kröller-Müller purchases the painting at the auction of the Hoogendijk collection on 21 May 1912.

The acquisition causes quite a stir: on her instruction, Bremmer bids more than five times the asking price. Helene calls the work one of the ‘most beautiful, most powerful, most crystal clear’ Van Goghs in her possession.

After spending almost two years in Paris, by early 1888 Vincent van Gogh has had enough of the city. Artist friends tell him about the south of France, ‘the land of the blue tones and bright colours’, and he decides that his next destination will be Provence. This proves to be a good choice: ‘I’ve never had such good fortune; nature here is extraordinarily beautiful. […] I can’t paint as beautifully as that, but it absorbs me so much that I let myself go without thinking about any rule.’

In Arles, Van Gogh makes several versions of the drawbridge over a canal, just south of the town. The clear blue water forms a diagonal in the picture, which leads the eye to the bridge and the covered wagon crossing it.

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51 VINCENT VAN GOGH Country road in Provence by night, c. 12-15 May 1890

52 VINCENT VAN GOGH Pink peach trees, c. 30 March 1888

Country road in Provence by night is probably the last painting that Van Gogh made in Saint-Rémy and he may have continued working on it during his stay in Auvers. The phase of the moon and position of the large and small star show the sky of 20 April 1890, a day after the new moon. The painting contains all the elements that for him are connected to the south of France, where he made such an important development as an artist: the reeds by the roadside that are reminiscent of the golden yellow wheat he often paints, the cypresses, the dark blue silhouette of the Alpilles in the background and the country inn.

During the blossom time in Arles, Van Gogh works for almost four weeks constantly on a series of fruit trees in bloom. He already became interested in this subject in Paris, influenced by Japanese prints. He decides to dedicate Pink peach trees, which he considers the best in the series, to the recently deceased Anton Mauve: his teacher and cousin by marriage. He feels that a painting dedicated to him should be ‘something that was both tender and very cheerful’ and not ‘a study in a more serious key’. Theo sends the painting to Mauve’s widow, their niece Jet, from whom Anton and Helene Kröller-Müller purchase it in 1918.

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53 PAUL SIGNAC La salle à manger, Opus 152, 1886-1887

54 THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE En juillet – avant midi, 1890

The young Signac begins his painting career as an impressionist. That changes in 1884 when he meets Georges Seurat.

He not only becomes a close friend, but is also deeply impressed by Seurat’s colour theories and pointillist painting technique.

The dining room is an early pointillist work by Signac. Here he avidly experiments with colour and the effects of complementary pairs of colours, mainly orange and blue.

Like his friend, he no longer mixes the colours on the palette, but places them side by side on the canvas in small dots and smudges. Seen from a distance, they give the colour effect that the painter intended.

In this painting, a woman and an older man sit at a table. A housemaid brings them the mail. The two women and the man are hardly people of flesh and blood. They seem rigid in their movement and wrapped up in themselves.

The complete lack of interaction between the figures gives this ordinary, everyday scene an uncomfortable atmosphere.

Théo Van Rysselberghe initially paints in an impressionistic style. That changes in 1886 when he sees Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at an exhibition in Paris.

This pointillist painting makes such an impression on him that he also begins painting with the pointillist technique, but with a distinctive, free style.

In July - before noon is a fine example of that. Here, Van Rysselberghe is mainly concerned with the depiction of the summery atmosphere and the bright light. The five women have no contact with each other and are all engaged in their own activity. This reinforces the atmosphere of peace and tranquillity on this summer afternoon and lends the scene a timeless character.

Van Rysselberghe began this painting in the summer of 1889. The woman in the blue dress in Maria Monnom, with whom he would marry in the autumn. That summer, the Monnom family stayed in Thuin, in southern Belgium. The garden shown here is probably the orchard of the nearby Abbey of Aulne.

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55 GEORGES SEURAT Le chenal de Gravelines: direction de la mer, summer 1890 Georges Seurat spent the last summer of his short life in the port town of Gravelines, just south of Dunkirk. For the four paintings that he made there, he chose a spot on the canalized River Aa, which connects the town with the sea.

He painted this spot at different times of the day and always from a different viewpoint.

In this version, the largest section of the painting is taken up by the harbour basin with the boats used to fish for herring and cod. However, no activities or people are visible. The boat that sails into the harbour doesn’t even seem to have a skipper. The air is just as motionless as the sea. The light is even and diffuse.

At first glance, The canal of Gravelines seems like a depiction of a harbour at a coincidentally quiet moment of the day. But here, Seurat has reduced the visual reality to a tranquil, harmonious composition, made up of countless dots in an extremely fine pointillism.

56 GEORGES SEURAT Le Chahut, 1889-1890 Georges Seurat’s paintings were based on contemporary colour theories and built up out of countless, meticulously applied dots of paint. Le Chahut, one of his most important works, was created in the context of the Parisian nightlife, in which he was a frequent visitor. Chahut (din or uproar) is another name for cancan (gossip or scandal), a dance that emerged in the Parisian working-class areas around 1830 and which caused a scandal with the high leg kicks. Seurat’s dance hall is immersed in warm colours and glowing artificial light. The figures seem more types rather than actual people of flesh and blood. They move in rhythmic repetition. All the lines and motions in the painting are directed upwards in order to evoke the lively atmosphere of the dance and the music.

Le Chahut is no superficial tableau, but a deeply considered painting: a strictly directed depiction of a dance hall, not just some snapshot of the Parisian nightlife.

57 ISAAC ISRAELS Mata Hari, 1916 Isaac Israels, son of The Hague School painter Jozef Israëls, developed into one of the representatives of Dutch

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impressionism. After his study at the Rijksacademie he remained in Amsterdam, where he recorded the city life and its turbulent nightlife. He paints rapidly, without too many details; he is interested in the distinguishing aspect of his subjects. He painted ten times as many women as men, at first mainly factory workers and housemaids, later also fashionable ladies. The Frisian Mata Hari, whose actual name was Margaretha Zelle, performed all over Europe as an exotic dancer. She was a hit in Paris in particular. But during the First World War she was accused of spying for the Germans and was eventually executed by firing squad in 1917. In this monu­ mental portrait, Israels paints her as an elegant, self-assured young woman.

The painting is rendered in loose, quick brushstrokes and smears, with little colour. All the attention is focused on her dignified, tall stature.

58 HENRI FANTIN-LATOUR Portrait d’Eva Callimachi-Catargi, 1881 Unlike his colleagues and friends, such as Manet and Renoir, Fantin-Latour was no innovator. He was a quiet, somewhat withdrawn painter with a fondness for dreamlike depictions, based on the music of Wagner and Brahms among others. But as there was virtually no market for this, he mainly painted flowerstill lifes, which provided him an income and 39

earned him the status of old master towards the end of his life. The portraits that he also made were usually of family members or, in the case of Eva Callimachi-Catargi, of friends. He painted her nearly life-sized as a nineteenth-century ‘grande dame’, but typified more by her stately pose and fine clothing than by excessive luxury. The lighting and tints in the painting are uniform and sober, but with a few accents of colour, in the gleaming golden bracelet, the fan and the flower in the bottom right corner. Helene Kröller-Müller received this wonderful, unassuming portrait as a gift from her husband Anton on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

59 AUGUSTE RENOIR Le clown musical, 1868 Unlike the other impressionists, Renoir painted few landscapes, but many portraits and scenes from the carefree nightlife of la belle époque. At a young age he was already painting characters in cafes, through which he also received commissions for portraits. He painted this clown, John Prince, for the owners of the café at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris.

The painting dates from his novice years, in which he made several large portraits.

The characteristic loose touch of impressionism is not yet visible here.

The clown is actually painted with great attention to detail in the make-up, the COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER

hair and the butterfly-adorned costume.

The white chair and white edge of the ring contrast sharply with the yellow ochre sand and the other, fairly dark colours. The depiction of the spectators is much sketchier. All the attention is focused on the larger than life-sized clown, who directs his stare in a concentrated action on something outside of the picture.

60 AUGUSTE RENOIR Au café, c. 1877 Together with Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir is one of the central figures of impressionism. But while Monet prefers to paint landscapes in the open air, Renoir takes everyday life as the theme

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for his paintings. He frequently enjoys painting in cafés, which also brings him all kinds of commissions for portraits.

Renoir aims to get as close as possible to reality, but in his observations he includes everything that stimulates the senses – light, colour, movement, atmosphere. This small painting in predominantly bright and dark shades of blue is a subtle play of contrasts.

The entire scene is blurred with no clear outlines.

The refined composition, with the sketchily painted figures in the background and the reflection of other café-goers in the mirror, gives a clear impression of a bustling café. This impression is reinforced by the quick, rough brushstrokes, which make everything appear to move. The result is a lively snapshot of Parisian life at the fin de siècle.

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61 SOLL LEWITT Wall drawing, 1971 American artist Sol LeWitt is considered the pioneer of conceptual art.

In 1967 he compiles a manifesto entitled Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, which would become the basis for this art movement. In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the core of the artwork.

LeWitt sets down on paper all his plans for works. He regards the execution as only ‘a matter of settlement’, something that can be done equally well by others.

This large drawing on one of the walls in the Kröller-Müller Museum is also made not by himself, but by his assistants, based on his carefully formulated instructions.

The entire wall is covered with a fine grid of pencil lines. Each square of the grid has the prescribed size of 4 by 4 centimetres. Then, from the horizontal centre line on the left and right side of the wall, sections of circles are drawn. The final result is a surface with a regular structure that covers the wall and forms a whole with it, like a giant spider’s web.

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62 ALBERTO GIACOMETTI L’homme qui marche II, 1960 In 1922, Alberto Giacometti settled in Paris, where he came into contact with cubism and surrealism among other things. He joined the surrealists and decided to give up sculpting after nature. But he left their ranks in 1935 and resumed his ‘old-fashioned’ working from a model. This led to him losing artist friends and patrons, but also to an artistic crisis. After fleeing Paris during the war, in Geneva Giacometti began making fine, threadlike sculptures: emaciated figures that seem to pose the question of how little physical form is required for a human to maintain a presence in their environment. They are fragile and isolated, afraid of the space.

Initially, they were not taken seriously, but in 1946 the sculptures were published in a magazine, whereby Giacometti gained renewed acclaim overnight. It was then that he created the series of striding figures with their heavy clubfeet, which have become his trademark.

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63 JULIO GONZÁLEZ La prière, 1932 Born into a family of precious metal smiths, Julio González grew up in an artistic environment. After a career as a painter, his background as a skilled metalworker re-emerged while in Paris.

He discovered the sculptural possibilities of simple sheet iron and used his knowledge of welding and cutting. His collaboration with Picasso in 1929 proved inspiring for both artists and would be hugely significant to the development of modern sculptural art. In La prière González works with ordinary iron rods and bars. The elongated figure with raised arms, in fact part of a depiction of two acrobats, was renamed Prayer.

The simple but expressive lines make a concentrated, almost written gesture.

‘Drawing in space’ as he himself calls it.

González was innovative due to his working with iron, but also because of his use of the space, which he regarded as a new material. La prière is a wonderful example of this.

64 WILHELM LEHMBRUCK Grosse Stehende, 1910 This larger than life-size female figure is the high point of a phase in Lehmbruck’s work, in which he familiarized himself with the classical ideals of beauty and COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER

balance. The sculpture was first exhibited at the Parisian Salon d’Automne in 1910. This Salon, which was set up as a reaction to the conservative exhibitions of the official Paris Salon, is the benchmark for the important developments in painting and sculptural art. The first version of Lehmbruck’s sculpture was cast in coloured plaster; later he made at least six versions in cement. Lehmbruck evidently found this material the most appropriate for what the sculpture is intended to express. Unlike marble or bronze, the cast cement produces a soft and saturated surface, with no metallic hardness or lighting effects that might otherwise detract from the introspective subject. The female figure is portrayed in a classical, tranquil pose, without any movement or gesture. The left-facing head with eyes closed also radiates serenity.

65 MARINO MARINI Cavallo e cavaliere, 1951-1955 Equestrian sculptures are the central theme in Marini’s work. This places him in line with Italian art history, in which equestrian statues of rulers play an important role. But he also reacts against fascist art with its heavy emphasis on power and domination. He creates his equestrian sculptures in bronze or wood, often with colour to reinforce the expressiveness. There are sculptures in 44

which the rider sits upright and relaxed and also sculptures of a horse rearing up with no rider. In this work the rider raises his arms in the air in panic. The horse tosses its head back and seems to want to throw the man off. Marini sees these different versions as expressions of respective unity, powerlessness and upset balance. The theme of the horse and rider is of great emotional significance to him, as it symbolizes human existence. In this work he shows the dependency and vulnerability of humankind in an incisive manner.

incorporated into so-called assemblages. Using only scrap material, he made a sculpture which is among the museum’s most popular works.

66 PABLO PICASSO Petite chouette, 1951-1953 Picasso dominated modern art for about three quarters of a century. Time and again, he was able to leave the beaten track behind and take a new course, which has made his work a symbol for freedom and independence. Petite chouette, a relatively late work, was created in the pottery centre Vallauris in Southern France. Picasso assembled it from an earthenware dish used to keep objects in place in the kiln, a few nails, screws, bolts and the lid of a tin can. All this is held together with plaster. Out of these prosaic, everyday objects, Picasso has conjured an emotive little creature: a young owl, vulnerable, but alert on his tall legs and with a slightly turned head.

Picasso is a master in the use of ‘objets trouvés’, found objects that he 45

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Van Gogh galerij

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Main entrance

Entrance sculpture garden

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67 RONI HORN Opposites of white, 2006-2007 These two objects by American artist Roni Horn were made by gradually pouring liquid glass into a mould for twenty-four hours and slowly allowing them to cool over a period of four months. The rough sides of the objects show the texture of the moulds. The tops are smooth and shiny, because here the glass has only been in contact with the air. Depending on the viewpoint, they sometimes appear as a razor-sharp surface, or conversely as an endless depth.

In this work, Roni Horn plays with the ambiguous properties of glass. It is melted and then solidified again into an apparently permanent state, but it is essentially a liquid. With this game, Horn causes the observer to become confused: it is impossible to determine the ‘identity’ of the material with the naked eye and whether the inside of the sculpture is solid or liquid.

Opposites of white forms a pair. There is no hierarchy between the parts.

The two elements, one black, the other white, have more in common than that they differ. In Horn’s view these objects are doppelgangers, opposites that both demonstrate the absence of colour, though white (light) actually contains all the colours.

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68 BRUCE NAUMAN Window or Wall Sign, 1967 Window or Wall Sign initially hung in the window of Bruce Nauman’s studio in a shopping street in San Francisco, next to the then still present advertisement for a beer brand. At first glance an ordinary neon advertisement, but with the provocative text: ‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths’.

This work confronts the observer not so much with an unshakable position, but more with a question: is this assertive statement true or is it a cliché? Is Nauman serious, or is he poking fun at this postulated truth?

Nauman presents his double message in a spiral: the ancient symbol of infinity.

The questions he raises over the role of art and the artist remain valid and will never be answered conclusively. For that reason, Window or Wall Sign hangs in the entrance hall of the Kröller-Müller Museum, as a message to the visitor.

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69 MARK DI SUVERO K-piece, 1972

70 OSWALD WENCKEBACH Monsieur Jacques, 1955

This impressive work takes its name from the fact that the large, bright red, riveted steel H beams, together form the letter K. But this was not the starting point of the structure. Di Suvero is mainly interested in the spatial effect of the linear elements that constitute the sculpture.

Although these are perfectly balanced, they constantly seem to lose that balance, which creates a certain tension.

Around 1960, the American artist began making large-scale, playful structures made up of massive wooden and iron beams, which are interconnected by means of ropes and steel cables. All the components keep each other in balance and appear to float in space.

Di Suvero usually produces his gigantic sculptures himself, and that is also the case with K-piece. He operated the crane with which the steel H beams were lifted and positioned and welded the parts together. This is his way of composing his sculptures, with the aid of a crane. He describes his sculpture as ‘a painting in three dimensions with the crane as my paintbrush’.

For the Dutch sculptor Oswald Wenckebach, this life-sized bronze statue represents the Dutch petite bourgeoisie. In his long overcoat, hands held loosely behind his back, left foot a half step forward, head tilted back slightly and to the right, the man makes a distinguished but disarmingly carefree impression. In his spot at the entrance to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Mister Jacques symbolizes an exhibition visitor.

Wenckebach strives for a sober, restrained design. For this, he takes his example from Greek classical sculpture.

During a holiday in the South of France in 1953, he begins work on a series of eight sculptures with Mister Jacques in the leading role. This distinctive and unassuming sculpture is the last in the series.

At the opening of the sculpture garden in 1961, the sculpture is given a prominent place on the lawn to the left of the museum. In more or less the same place, Mister Jacques still adorns the path to the entrance today. He is not only a visitors’ favourite, but also an icon of the museum.

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KRÖLLER-MÜLLER MUSEUM – AUGUST 2020