A sweeping new exhibition at London's National Gallery is shining a spotlight on Helene Kröller-Müller, the trailblazing German heiress who became one of Europe's most influential art collectors and established a revolutionary template for 20th-century art philanthropy. "Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists," running until February 8, 2026, showcases the remarkable vision of a woman who recognized Vincent van Gogh's genius long before the art world caught on.
Kröller-Müller, often described as Europe's answer to American collectors Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Peggy Guggenheim, built one of the continent's greatest modern art collections over just three decades. Her extraordinary collection of 11,500 objects featured luminaries of Neo-Impressionist and Modern art, including Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, and Piet Mondrian. For more than eight decades, this coveted collection has been on public display at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.
The exhibition focuses on the late 19th century, revealing how a new generation of experimental artists took the baton from the Impressionists and became the often-cited forefathers of Modern art. Leading figures like Van Gogh, Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, and Seurat are featured prominently, with Seurat's infamous "Le Chahut (Cancan Dancers)" (1889-90) being shown in the U.K. for the first time. The show also highlights lesser-known but important painters whose careers Kröller-Müller helped establish, including Jan Toorop, Théo van Rysselberghe, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Maximilien Luce, along with choice loans from private collections featuring works by notable woman painter Anna Boch.
Born in 1869 to a wealthy industrialist, Kröller-Müller's journey to becoming an art world powerhouse began unconventionally. She was only 19 when she married her father's most promising employee, Dutch entrepreneur Anton Kröller. While he built Müller & Co. into a highly profitable international powerhouse, Helene had four children before age 30. It wasn't until 1905 that she could dedicate her leisure hours to developing a nascent interest in art.
Kröller-Müller's beloved teacher Hendricus Petrus Bremmer became something of a proto-art advisor, visiting studios, galleries, and auction houses on her behalf to help source new works. By 1913, she had established a private museum in her name in The Hague, the first dedicated to modern art in the Netherlands. As her collection grew rapidly, Kröller-Müller gained recognition for much more than merely writing checks.
Long before Van Gogh became one of art history's most prized artists, Kröller-Müller had amassed the world's largest private Van Gogh collection, containing no fewer than 91 paintings and 180 works on paper. Her deep interest in the impact of Neo-Impressionists like Van Gogh on contemporary artistic developments led her to publish the 1925 book "Considerations regarding problems in the development of Modern painting," in which she proposed two dominant strands in Modern art: realism and idealism.
Kröller-Müller was even a pioneer of the classic white cube modern art gallery aesthetic, which she first considered with prominent De Stijl designer Bart van der Leck in 1916 for the art room in her new villa. Though that plan was eventually abandoned as too radical, the look was later adopted after Kröller-Müller bequeathed her collection to the Dutch nation and oversaw designs for a new museum by Belgian architect Henry van der Velde. Since opening in 1938, a year before Kröller-Müller's death, her museum has been housed on Helene and Anton's formerly private estate, Hoge Veluwe National Park, now a national park in Otterlo.
Among the exhibition's standout works is Van Gogh's "The Sower" (1888), part of Kröller-Müller's collecting journey that began with the Dutch master. She became so enamored with Van Gogh that in 1912, she went on a hunt for all the best Van Goghs with Bremmer in Paris. She described the effect of his paintings as "powerful, dramatic & heavy, like hammer blows" except for "a few exceptional works that were conversely delicate or very calm." The exhibition includes her very first Van Goghs acquired in 1907 – "Four sunflowers gone to seed" (1887) and "Edge of a Wood" (1883) – alongside "The Sower," made after an 1850 painting of the same name by Jean-François Millet.
Seurat's "Le Chahut" (1889-90) represents another major highlight, showcasing the artist's revolutionary Pointillism technique. In developing this painting method using small dots of pure color, Seurat boldly developed and departed from Impressionist ideas. Unlike the Impressionists' harmonies of similar colors, Seurat positioned contrasting hues beside each other according to scientific color theory, creating vibrations that merged in the viewer's eye. "Le Chahut," or the "Cancan Dancers," was one of Seurat's most divisive paintings when first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1890, with critics comparing its formal language to advertisements for popular entertainments.
Henri-Edmond Cross's "Bullfight" (1891-92) demonstrates another facet of the collection, as Cross ranks among the best-represented artists after Van Gogh and Seurat. Kröller-Müller cherished Cross for his placid, abstracted landscapes that captured "a sense of the unchanging pure reality behind the changeable forms of nature." The bullfight painting, viewed from the bleachers, becomes a study of the act of looking, with much of the action concealed by another spectator's head while another viewer peers through binoculars.
Jan Toorop's "Evening (before the Strike)" (ca. 1888-89) represents the Dutch artist's central role in the Belgian avant-garde artistic society Les XX (The Twenty), which played a prominent part in developing Neo-Impressionism. Toorop was notable for his interest in working-class subjects, and this work, paired with "Morning (after the Strike)" (1888-89), pulls viewers into the precarious yet tenderly depicted world of striking laborers. The paintings were inspired by the poor treatment of strikers in Charleroi, showing a family's anticipation of violent retribution and its tragic aftermath.
The exhibition also features Théo van Rysselberghe's portrait "Anna Boch" (1892), another key member of Les XX. The Belgian painter created the very last Neo-Impressionist artwork acquired by Kröller-Müller: "In July, before Noon," a charming, summery Pointillist composition featuring five women at rest from 1890. Anna Boch herself was an accomplished artist recently featured in a long-overdue exhibition "Anna Boch: An Impressionist Journey in Ostend and Pont-Aven" in 2023.
This groundbreaking exhibition not only celebrates Kröller-Müller's extraordinary collecting vision but also illuminates the crucial transitional period in art history when Neo-Impressionists laid the groundwork for Modern art. Through her pioneering efforts, Kröller-Müller established a legacy that continues to educate and inspire visitors at both her namesake museum in the Netherlands and now at the National Gallery in London, where her revolutionary taste and dedication to artistic innovation can be appreciated by a new generation of art lovers.
