3 September 2025

Joining the dots of 20th-century art

“Radical Harmony” at the National Gallery reveals how super-patron Helene Kröller-Müller established pointillism and influenced a generation of painters.

By Michael Prodger

*The Channel at Gravelines, in the Direction of the Sea* (1890) by Georges Seurat. Photograph by Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands. Photographer: Rik Klein

In 1886, at the eighth and final impressionist exhibition, the 27-year-old Georges Seurat exhibited A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte. The painting, the fruit of two years’ work, marked a still new artistic style ceding its place in the avant-garde to an even newer one. Seurat’s picture was a monumental depiction of Parisians at ease in a park by the Seine, and in it he refined the impressionist tache – the short dabs that were a feature of many of the group’s works – into dots of pure, contrasting colour. According to contemporary scientific theory, the dots would be blended in the eye to produce richer tones and harmonies than could be achieved by mixing paints on the palette. The idea was not new: the great romantic painter Eugène Delacroix had tried it as early as 1822 in his Barque of Dante, but Seurat was the first to employ it comprehensively.

This new manner was christened divisionism (Seurat’s preferred name), more pejoratively pointillism, and more art historically neo-impressionism. As the technique took hold, its critics derided it as mechanistic, soulless and as painting with “artillery and confetti”, while adherents, such as the collector and connoisseur Félix Fénéon, likened it ecstatically to “a swarming of prismatic spangles”. There was, however, a paradox at the movement’s heart: here was a method founded on supposedly hard-nosed science being co-opted with the aim of making visual poetry. Seurat saw no contradiction; the neo-impressionists’ systematic technique, he wrote, “does not disable their power to sense, it guides and protects it”.

Neo-impressionism quickly caught the imagination of a group of young international painters, among them Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, Maximilien Luce and Henri-Edmond Cross from France, Théo van Rysselberghe from Belgium, and Jan Toorop and, briefly, Vincent van Gogh from the Netherlands (Van Gogh had encountered Seurat’s work when he stopped by his studio on his way to Montparnasse Station to take a train to Arles – the trip that would culminate in his ear-lopping breakdown).

The radicalism of the style was matched by the politics of some of the painters – for example, Pissarro, Luce and Cross (and Fénéon) were anarchists, while most were deeply engaged politically and all gave precedence to rural over urban life. The combination meant that neo-impressionism was at odds with much of the picture-buying bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the painters found a redoubtable supporter in Helene Kröller-Müller, a patron slightly younger than many of the artists, who formed a collection of some 50 of their works, the most comprehensive to be found anywhere.

The pictures are today housed in the Kröller-Müller Museum, a luminous, low-level building – a pioneer of the white-wall gallery – that sits among the woods in a national park near Otterlo in the Netherlands. Some 35 of them are coming to London as the focus of “Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists” at the National Gallery. It is an exhibition as much about one woman’s taste as the works she acquired.

Helene (1869-1939) was born in Essen in Germany into a family running an iron ore and shipping company. It was her Dutch husband, Anton Kröller, whose acumen turned the business into a hugely successful enterprise. Helene had no real artistic provenance but in 1905 she attended art appreciation classes under Hendricus Bremmer and came into contact with contemporary painting. “Art is that which gives an emotion,” he preached, “and is made with the intention of giving an emotion.” Bremmer was not just an artist himself but a specialist in Van Gogh and an admirer of the neo-impressionists. In 1907, Kröller-Müller recruited him to help her build a collection and unsurprisingly he directed her to the artists he himself favoured.

Then, in 1911, following a medical emergency, she decided that the paintings she had started to gather with the company’s seemingly limitless funds should be made available to the public and in 1913 she opened the Museum Kröller in The Hague. By this time she was already voracious: during a trip to Paris in 1912 she embarked on a Van Gogh shopping spree, buying 12 paintings and drawings in a week. Between 1907 and 1935 she amassed some 11,500 works of art – the equivalent of a piece a day for nearly 30 years.

During that expensive Paris week she also first encountered the work of Seurat and met Paul Signac. She found in the Signacs she bought “something so unintentional and sincere and the things still feel like something other than merely visions of colour”, while Seurat’s painting was nothing less than “a spiritualisation of art: applying the colour to the canvas dot by dot in order to contemplate things more calmly and profoundly”. Although this was the case with the cluster of still, almost austere, Seurats showing the port of Gravelines between Calais and Dunkirk painted in 1890, it was not true of the most spectacular of his paintings she purchased.

In 1922, Helene bought Seurat’s noisy, high-kicking cancan picture Le Chahut (1889-90) as the centrepiece of her collection (although she turned down the opportunity to buy La Grande Jatte). This large, bustling image, which the painter described as one of his toiles de luttes (“battle canvases” in that they were a manifesto for his new style), is a continuation of Degas’s nightclub-café concert pictures but in his hands an exercise in compressed space, rhythm and curves. The painting is coming to London, the first time it has left the museum since 1958.

By the 1920s, Müller and Co was overextending, in part because of Helene’s picture buying, and in 1928 a foundation was formed to safeguard the collection: no paintings were sold to reimburse creditors. Indeed, even as the company’s fortunes waned, Helene planned a new museum to house her pictures. It was eventually financed by the state as a prerequisite for the pictures being transferred to its care.

What Helene envisioned for her collection were pictures that would display the trajectory of painting from mid-19th-century realism to what she called early-20th-century “idealism”. Her motto, which became her museum’s, was Spiritus et materia unum (“spirit and matter are one”). It was what she looked for in her purchases, and wrote about in her 1925 book Considerations Regarding Problems in the Development of Modern Painting, which identified the motive force as “an inner urge to reproduce new feelings” for which “there was a need for a new form”.

Her own inner urges led her to a close friendship with Sam van Deventer, a man 20 years her junior, to whom she wrote nearly 3,500 letters. He also became a favourite with Anton and was granted an apartment at the couple’s huge and elaborate hunting lodge in the museum park. There was a narrow staircase that linked his rooms to Helene’s bedroom. She supposedly asked that he be buried between her and her husband – in fact he was eventually interred next to them.

Whether it was paintings or people, Helene Kröller-Müller wanted to keep her most precious possessions – the things that gave her spiritual succour.

Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists
National Gallery, London WC2. Until 8 February 2026