Netherlands Guide
The eastern Netherlands
The Kröller-Müller Museum
Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–5pm
Price: €12 with park admission included
Website: www.kmm.nl
Most people who visit the Hoge Veluwe Park come for the Kröller-Müller Museum, made up of the private art collection of the Kröller-Müllers. It's one of the country's finest museums, a wide cross-section of modern European art from Impressionism to Cubism and beyond, housed in a low-slung building that was built for the collection in 1938 by the Belgian architect Van de Velde. In the 1970s a new transparent wing by the Dutch architect Wim Quist was added.
The bulk of the collection is in one long wing, starting with the most recent painters and working backward. There's a good set of paintings, in particular some revealing self-portraits by Charley Toorop, one of the most skilled and sensitive of twentieth-century Dutch artists. Her father, Jan, also gets a good showing throughout the museum and Piet Mondrian is well represented, too. One surprise is an early Picasso, Portrait of a Woman, from 1901, a classic post-Impressionist canvas very dissimilar from his more famous works.
The building as a whole gravitates toward the works of Vincent van Gogh, with one of the most complete collections of his work in the world, housed in a large room around a central courtyard and placed in context by accompanying contemporary pictures. The museum owns no fewer than 278 Van Gogh pieces (both paintings and drawings), and exhibits are rotated, with the exception of his most important paintings.
Finally, outside the museum, behind the main building, there's a Sculpture Garden (Tues– Sun 10am–4.30pm; free entrance with museum ticket), recently doubled in size and now the largest in Europe. Some frankly bizarre creations reside within its 25 hectares, as well as works by Auguste Rodin, Jacob Epstein and Barbara Hepworth. In contrast to the carefully conserved paintings of the museum, the sculptures are exposed to the weather and you can even clamber all over Jean Dubuffet's Jardin d'email, one of his larger and more elaborate jokes.