The Dutch Tile Museum opens Helene Kröller-Müller Room

15 Apr 2019

As of 10 May, Helene Kröller-Müller’s tile collection will be on display in the Dutch Tile Museum (Het Nederlands Tegelmuseum) in Otterlo. After the successful presentation 'De vergeten tegelcollectie van Helene Kröller-Müller' (Helene Kröller-Müller’s forgotten tile collection) in the summer of 2017, the idea arose to give the tile collection a permanent place in the Dutch Tile Museum. Thus the Kröller-Müller Museum has loaned this collection.

Helene Kröller-Müller (1869-1939) is best known for the impressive collection of modern art that she brought together in the first decades of the twentieth century. Far less well-known is that she also assembled a collection of Delftware, which includes a series of Old Dutch wall tiles. This collection was created before she began to focus on visual art.

She herself called the Delftware ‘a very attractive component’ of her collection, in which one can ‘follow the development of this exceptional faience art from the beginning of the 17th century to its decline at the end of the 18th century’.

With the Helene Kröller-Müller Room, the Dutch Tile Museum has gained a permanent crowd pleaser. The Kröller-Müller has the opportunity to reveal a part of the collection that would otherwise remain inaccessible. For the public, this means a chance to enjoy a relatively unknown collection. For museum professionals it is a good example of museum cooperation in terms of collection mobility and knowledge exchange.

The Helene Kröller-Müller Room is designed by Studio Berry Slok.

To the website of the Tegelmuseum

The Helene Kröller-Müller Room is made possible thanks to support from the Helene Kröller-Müller Fund.