Squatting Woman

In 1950 the Kröller-Müller Museum had a new director and an old rule to work around. Helene Kröller-Müller, who founded it, had laid down that the collection could grow only with work by artists already in it. Bram Hammacher noticed that her charter spoke of painting and said nothing at all about sculpture, and he read it that way. That same year he bought three bronzes by Rodin, and this crouching woman was the one he loved most.

She began around 1882 as a figure about 30 centimetres high, one of the damned on the Gates of Hell. This bronze is cast from the life-size version Rodin had enlarged some 25 years later. Hammacher said Rodin's sculptor's spirit showed in the way he treated a surface, and it is the worked, uneven skin he meant. From 1953 she stood indoors in the museum's new sculpture gallery, and when the sculpture garden opened in June 1961 she was moved out onto a sandstone pedestal among the trees. In 2019 she was brought back inside for a few months, for an exhibition about how Hammacher built up the sculpture collection.