Pierre Alexandre Regnault

Pierre Alexandre Regnault was a Dutch businessman who built an outstanding collection of modern art in the interwar years that primarily featured artists of the School of Paris. He played a key role in the reception of modern European art in the Netherlands, making his collection accessible through loans and donations to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. As a writer and publisher, Regnault also lent his support to modern art more generally through his activities.

In 1916, Regnault started a company that manufactured paint and initially exported its products to the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia). From 1919 to 1938 his company opened factories in the cities of Surabaya, Batavia, and Semarang, as well as in Singapore, achieving a truly multinational scope. Initially, Regnault did not demonstrate a clear vision for his collection, but followed his developing taste and strong visual orientation, while expanding his knowledge of modern art beyond the Dutch context. Regnault saw himself in competition with Helene Kröller-Müller, a prominent member of the Dutch haute bourgeoisie, who was developing her own collection at the same time.

From 1914 to 1918, the initial years of his collecting, Regnault favored Belgian artists working in an expressionist style. During the 1920s, his taste evolved and he began collecting colorful figurative paintings by artists of the School of Paris. Despite being Dutch, Regnault was never attracted to abstract art developed by his compatriots. Indeed, he considered Piet Mondrian’s work far too dogmatic and paid little attention to the De Stijl group.

By 1925, Regnault had achieved enough success in business to devote more time and resources to his collection. He began traveling to Paris annually, befriending such artists as Marc Chagall and Ossip Zadkine, from whom he bought directly, and also collecting the work of Massimo Campigli and Jean Lurçat, among others. During his stays in Paris he not only visited the established galleries on the Right Bank (Galerie Georges Petit and Galerie Bernheim-Jeune) but also newer ones located in Montparnasse. In 1929, he met the gallerist Jeanne Bucher who became his agent and, to some extent, tried to bring focus to Regnault’s collection. Fueled by the success of his business, which was not affected by the 1929 stock market crash, Regnault added about four hundred works to his collection between 1926 and 1940; these included works by Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Kees van Dongen, Vassily Kandinsky, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Chaïm Soutine, among others.

Regnault not only purchased modern art but also became an active publisher and writer. From 1932 until 1940, for example, he published Verf en Kunst, a Dutch periodical that advertised paint products and featured his short texts on the artists whose work he collected.

Throughout his years as a collector, Regnault lent works to the Stedelijk Museum, often immediately after purchasing them. From 1923, in fact, the museum started to exhibit works from the city’s holdings together with those in private collections, including those from Regnault. While he didn’t aspire to build his own museum like Kröller-Müller, Regnault wanted his collection to be accessible to the public. After a major, seven-gallery display of his holdings at the Stedelijk in 1938, most of the works remained on long-term loan until the Second World War. After Regnault’s death in 1954, his heirs sold over two hundred works from his collection at auction. Fortunately, in 1953 he had donated thirty-seven works to the Stedelijk Museum and, five years later, the government purchased twenty more, at least partly fulfilling Regnault’s desire to make modern art accessible to Dutch audiences.