By Dea Adria Mallin

The Sculpture Garden Kröller-Müller Museum at the Hoge Veluwe Arnhem, The Netherlands

It will be hard to give up a day in Amsterdam for anything else, but make a trip to the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, about six miles from the Dutch city of Arnhem and easily accessible by bus and train from Amsterdam. Its stellar Vincent Van Gogh collection, with 93 paintings and 183 drawings, plus superb works by Seurat, Monet, Gauguin, Picasso, Gris, Courbet, Corot, Millet, Mondrian, and more will give you everything you came for, but you’ll be surprised at everything else.

The “everything else” here comes via Helene Muller, who married Dutchman Anton Kroller, who soon turned her industrialist father’s business into a multinational giant in the early 20^th century. This enabled Kroller-Muller to give time to collecting art, often purchasing works directly from the artist’s studio. In 1935, she transferred ownership of her collection to the state of The Netherlands, which built a museum to house it.  A sculpture garden of 21 hectares was added in 1961, a new wing in 1977, and a sculpture wood and park in 1988.  Interested in preserving both art and nature for the Dutch nation, before her death in 1939, Mrs. Kroller-Muller also turned the family’s 6,000- hectare estate into Hoge Veluwe National Park, the largest park in The Netherlands, with wildlife and visitors freely traversing its moors, vast forests, expanses of grassland, and sand drifts.

Today, when you arrive at the museum and park, you will be “greeted” at the visitor’s center by a gaggle of 900 white bicycles. The bicycle is part of the Dutch way of life, and if you are so inclined, you could tour the entire country on its 6,215 miles of well-marked routes of fietspaden (cycle paths). With typical Dutch goodwill, the cycles in the park are free and range in size and style from tandem to wheelchair, to pint-sized bikes for small children, whose biking abilities in The Netherlands seem to kick in just after toddlerhood.  At gathering spots around the park, more of these bikes can be found, so that a visitor might decide at any moment to ride from point to point. We rode the bikes for about 15 miles along woodland paths of dappled light and through open fields. There are more than 42 kilometers of scenic cycling paths, plus two terraced restaurants in case you forget to bring a picnic lunch.

First off, however, visit the museum. Here, in the spacious galleries, you can immerse yourself in Van Gogh. Helene Kroller-Muller saw Van Gogh as “one of the great souls of modern art, on whom the times had no grasp,” and in 1912, only 22 years after his death, she was able to add 35 of his paintings to her collection.  Considering that Van Gogh’s entire career as an artist lasted no more than a decade, and that prior to his suicide in 1890, he had sold only one of his 800 paintings, her instincts as a collector were excellent.  The collection includes extraordinary pencil sketches, early pieces, a really lovely 1882 painting, called Girl in White in the Woods, done at the Hagus, and from his last years, writhing cypresses, buckling buildings and sun, moon, and stars so enlarged as to bring the sky down on the viewer.

The Cafe Terrace at Night, Vincent van Gogh

Several times, I was brought up short by brushstrokes of layered paint that I had not expected. In Van Gogh’s 1888 painting of the Café Terrace at Night in Arles, the lantern that is so identifiable in every slide and reproduction I’ve ever seen is only a lantern from a distance of 10 feet or more. Move closer, or stand directly in front, and it (but nothing in the rest of the painting) is all lumped yellow oils.  I was especially taken with the 1890 Cypresses With Two Figures. Van Gogh once spoke of cypresses as being “as beautiful of line and proportions as Egyptian obelisks,” and as “a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine.”  No reproduction can begin to tell the power of the brushstroke on the cypresses here, of the mad energy brought under complete artistic control.

Unlike a day at the Rijksmuseum, time spent in the Kroller-Muller Museum will not tire you (it is beautifully spacious; the newer building integrates indoors and outdoors, and there are plenty of comfortable seats for viewing the paintings in each gallery), and you will want to walk through the sculpture garden, sculpture park and sculpture woods.

These were the first sculpture gardens in Europe, designed in the 1950’s to showcase the museum’s collection. With shrubbery as walls and the sky as ceiling, the visitor mingles with the works of Rodin, Bourdelle, Lipchitz, Maillol and Wotruba, where each human figure in the collection expresses an emotion.

Beyond this point, the narrative content ceases, and abstract sculpture – of material, of space, of form, of place – prevails. The polished surfaces of Jean Arp’s 1953 Cloud Shepherd glint – no, gleam – in the sunlight, rendering the static dynamic in the shifting light. Nearby, on the pond, a floating white sculpture drifts on the watery surface, first a swan, then a mushroom, then perhaps a sun and moon.  Going on, we come to works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Noguchi, Paolozzi and Oldenburg.

White Enamel Garden, Jean Dubuffet’s Jardin d’Email

It might be important to know in advance what is waiting to be seen in the gardens, and then, it might be better to know nothing and be surprised, astonished, delighted. Not knowing about Jean Dubuffet’s Jardin d’Email, I came to a high circular white wall, and had I not heard children’s squeals of delight high above my head, would never have walked the circumference to a hidden spiral staircase with a latched door. Up, up, up to the top where a world of white, outlined in black, undulates before me, set only against treetops and sky, and I join the children to explore this endless white enamel “garden.”

Now, we take bikes to explore the park, but first make an appointment at the visitors’ desk in the museum building to see the house where the Kroller-Mullers lived. Only a small number of people can tour at any given time, so appointments are required.  I took the woodiest of the woodsy paths, hoping to spot a sculpted bronze tree among the bark trees, but pedaled right by it both going and coming, failing to distinguish artifice from nature.

No matter. Everything in my day at De Hoge Beluwe National Park is the coming together of art and nature, exactly as Helene Kroller-Muller wanted it.

Dea Adria Mallin is a professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia.