WASSENAAR, the Netherlands — The Dutch chemical company executive and art collector Joop van Caldenborgh was attending a dinner in London in the 1990s when the American abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly approached him.

“I didn’t even know what the artist looked like,” Mr. van Caldenborgh confessed recently. “A man came to me and said: ‘You must be Joop van Caldenborgh. You have “Blue Ripe.”’ I was so astonished that he knew.”

“Blue Ripe” (1959), one of Mr. Kelly’s early colorist paintings, is the first work that visitors encounter when they enter the Ellsworth Kelly retrospective at Mr. van Caldenborgh’s new private museum here, Museum Voorlinden, situated on a 100-acre nature preserve in the meadows and on the dunes of the Netherlands’ west coast. The exhibition, “Anthology,” is the first large-scale survey of Kelly’s work since the artist died in December.

That this low-profile Dutch businessman could pull together such a significant representation of Kelly’s work — with loans from the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, Tate London, the Pompidou Center in Paris and the artist’s own studio — for his private museum in a far-flung corner of the Netherlands indicates the kind of leverage that Mr. van Caldenborgh, 75, and other major collectors, now have in the art world.