Going Dutch

High surveys the gewgaws in one patron’s collection

“Idiosyncratic” is how scholar Nancy J. Troy characterizes Helene Kröller-Müller’s eye. Kröller-Müller was a very rich Dutch art collector whose husband’s deep pockets equaled her febrile curiosity for modernist greats like Picasso, Leger, Odilon Redon and Van Gogh.

The 84 works in Van Gogh to Mondrian: Modern Art from the Kröller-Müller Museum, organized by the High Museum, represent Kröller-Müller’s (1869-1939) quest for works she thought embodied “the emotional objectivization of the spiritual Self.” A tall order, but one Kröller-Müller favorites like Van Gogh undeniably aced. At times, Kröller-Müller was like a trophy wife on a Gucci spree, purchasing as many as five Van Goghs a day in a collection that topped out at nearly 300 works by the artist, second only to Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum.

But Kröller-Müller’s taste was fickle and so was her support. She was able to shape the career of artists like Piet Mondrian, giving him financial and emotional encouragement to develop new techniques. But Kröller-Müller was no fan of abstraction, and when Mondrian moved away from work grounded in representation, the purse strings were pulled shut, a necessary, albeit painful, step in the evolution of Mondrian’s work.

Van Gogh is an appropriately idiosyncratic reflection of Kröller-Müller’s taste. There are some individually great works and some surprises, but the show never feels entirely cohesive or convincing in its survey of some modernist powerhouses, perhaps because of the underwhelming works sandwiched in between.

Kröller-Müller’s taste is asserted not only in her choice of paintings but in her architecture and furniture. A share of the exhibition space is given over to a representation of how Kröller-Müller incorporated her aesthetic sensibilities into her physical domain. But the display of architectural drawings and furniture sandwiched in between works by Seurat and Van Gogh can feel a little tangential. Will audiences exclaim, “Yeah, the Van Goghs are great, but didya get a look at Helene’s teak sideboard!?”

Ironically, this aspect of the show provides some mind-bending insights into a woman who may have been the female answer to William Randolph Hearst, with her taste for livin’ large. There is among the sketches of rooms and estates the must-be-seen-to-be-believed St. Hubertus hunting lodge, meant to represent that saint’s religious epiphany with a crucifix lodged in a deer’s antlers. Designed by H.P. Berlage, the building is appropriately ecstatic — a phallic spire rises upward from two antler wings. Like something straight out of King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, it’s a building that puts every extreme of megalomaniacal Stalinist architecture to shame.

There are undeniable high points in the exhibition, like Fernand Leger’s 1917 painting “Soldiers Playing at Cards,” a fitting use of the artist’s mechanized cubism to depict the anonymous tin soldiers of war. Also thrilling is Jan Toorop’s decadent drawing “The Three Brides,” a Metropolis-meets-heavy metal fantasia of erotic darkness limned in the precise lines of Art Nouveau.

The money shots are, of course, Van Gogh, the most represented painter in the show with 22 drawings and paintings (albeit somewhat diminished when seen beneath glass). And while the paintings, including an iconic “Self-Portrait,” offer that frisson of recognition after being reproduced in art books, the drawings are less well known and therefore a fresher elaboration of his startling skill and insight. The sampling of works in Van Gogh to Mondrian — sketches of women on washday and the moving painting “Sorrowing Old Man” — give a tangible sense of the painter as someone who articulates his distance from the world even as he offers us a sublime connection to it.

felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com