The presence of Alfred Bader is felt deeply at Agnes. Reminders of his larger-than-life vision and generosity abound—from the many artworks donated, exhibition and study spaces funded, to the many people whose lives he, along with his wife Isabel, his first wife Helen (Danny) and their sons Daniel and David, changed in immeasurable ways. This connection is perhaps felt even more strongly by the Bader Curator of European Art, who works intensely with The Bader Collection and is charged with its stewardship, a position I have been privileged to hold since 2020.
While I was fortunate enough to get to know Isabel before her passing in August 2022, my Bader curatorship was the first to commence after Alfred’s passing in December 2018. Despite this, his interests and vision inform many decisions around the collection and its associated programs. Due to the wealth of material left—Bader’s two autobiographies, his writings on painting in Sigma-Aldrich’s Aldrichimica Acta, his personal papers preserved at Queen’s Archives, and of course, the more than 500 artworks now in our care—a robust impression of the collector’s idiosyncrasies and priorities is allowed to take shape. Writing this essay, I can imagine a lack of pretension with which he might advise me not to spend so much time writing about him rather than the artworks he so loved. Therefore, to this Alfred Bader—an enduring creative and intellectual interlocutor within Agnes’s conversations—I propose, as a compromise, to write about his personal and philanthropic legacy carried forward in the collection, and how it finds connection with the ideals guiding the vision for the museum’s future.
Drs Alfred and Isabel Bader with Rembrandt van Rijn’s Head of an Old Man in a Cap, 2003.
Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s expansion under construction in 1999, funded in part by a generous gift from Alfred Bader.
In that near future, Agnes is poised to reopen under the header of Agnes Reimagined, which, as Agnes Director and Curator Emelie Chhangur describes, “is a long-term social practice project, with architecture as its medium and the curatorial as its methodology … a proposition from which new museological practices emerge.”1 Within this methodological framework, we will be required to rethink not only how The Bader Collection finds its place in a different spatial context, but also how it can best fulfill this shared vision. How can the collection enter a new chapter of engagement while building on the strong foundation of scholarship, renown, and appreciation it has accumulated over time? One answer lies in the values with which it was formed.
Any collection is inevitably shaped by a collector’s preferences and interests, not in the least those pertaining to artistic and aesthetic considerations. Yet a more subdued quality of private collections—formed, after all, through the deeply personal process of selecting, curating and enjoying artworks during one’s lifetime—lies in the personal ethos of the collector. This seems particularly true for The Bader Collection, which in myriad ways reflects Bader’s ideals and sensibilities.2 For more elaborate discussion of the correspondences between these values and Alfred Bader’s collecting activities, see Suzanne van de Meerendonk, “Drawn From Life: Alfred Bader’s Collecting Interests in Context” in Tanya Paul, Catherine Sawinski and Suzanne van de Meerendonk, Art, Life, Legacy: Northern European Paintings in the Collection of Alfred and Isabel Bader (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2023), 27-37. The link between Bader’s biography and collecting preferences was also explored in the exhibition Alfred Bader Collects: Celebrating Fifty Years of The Bader Collection, curated at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre by then Bader Curator of European Art Dr. Jacquelyn N. Coutré in 2017. The life of this “chemist-collector” was marked by both extraordinary successes as well as hardships at a young age. These formative experiences, which include a harrowing escape from Nazi-occupied Austria and subsequent internment in a prisoner-of-war camp in Southern Quebec, shaped a lifelong commitment to principles of generosity, hospitality and social justice. Bader’s own perseverance through these struggles, as well as the kindness of others shown during crucial moments, also inspired a deeply held belief in the power of individual agency and responsibility.3Yechiel Barchaim has described Alfred Bader’s role in his philanthropy by referencing the teaching of Hillel in the Talmudic Tractate, Pirke Avot (The Sayings of the Fathers II:6), “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man” explaining this could be interpreted either as “one should be virtuous even in the absence of any partners or observers” or “where no one else will step forward, you do it.” Alfred Bader, Chemistry & Art: Further Adventures of a Chemist Collector (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008), 224-225; On the topic of Abraham and the destruction of Sodom, Bader expressed a similar opinion by citing the quote attributed to President John F. Kennedy “One man can make the difference, and every man should try.” Aldrichimica Acta 6, no. 1 (1973).
Not surprisingly, such themes frequently surface in The Bader Collection, particularly in biblical works with strong moral implications such as Elijah and The Widow of Zarephath, Ruth and Naomi and The Good Samaritan.4For a more examples, see Van de Meerendonk, “Drawn From Life.”
In these narratives, the central message revolves around selfless aid or loyalty shown by protagonists to others, whether complete strangers—as the Prophet Elijah was to the Widow of Zarephath, or the traveler to the Samaritan—or one’s (chosen) family, such as the young Moabite Ruth and her Judean mother-in-law Naomi. Writing about Reyer Jacobsz van Blommendael’s The Good Samaritan, Alfred Bader remarked when such scenes engaged what he considered “the greatest of all the Biblical commandments” to “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:9-18), adding that “if only we understood the lesson truly, that our neighbor is all mankind, we would try harder to give the best possible service, to all who need help.”5Alfred Bader, in Aldrichimica Acta 13, no. 3 (1980): 41. Addressing the commandment again in both of his autobiographies, he assigned particular meaning to the verse “you shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16) which underlines the moral obligation to be proactive in one’s commitment to justice—a commitment measured in deeds more than words or intentions.6Alfred Bader, Adventures of a Chemist Collector (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995): 181; Bader, Chemistry & Art, 206.
Taking these statements as a point of departure, it is valid to ask: How can The Bader Collection, and Agnes more broadly, actively work to be a good neighbour? Beyond curating the collection to further art historical and artistic inquiry, how can future projects that revolve around The Bader Collection build on the foundation of moral responsibility to actively counter injustice that was central to Bader’s life work?
Leading up to Agnes’s 2022 closure, experimentation around these motivations and its curatorial methodology began. Existentially human questions around the experience of solitude, for instance—as well as (lack of) privileged access to it—formed the base of the exhibition Studies in Solitude: The Art of Depicting Seclusion (4 September 2021–26 June 2022), mounted at Agnes amid the upheavals of the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition drew from the collection’s many paintings that depict figures in solitary contexts, including scholars, hermits, and subjects engaged in private devotion. Such scenes place heightened emphasis on the artistic expression of human interiority—a quality often appreciated by Alfred Bader and mobilized in the curation of the exhibition.7On Salomon Koninck’s An Old Man Wearing a Beret (accession no. 56-003.22), for instance, Bader wrote that it “leaves you with an unforgettable image of wisdom in old age […] The old man depicted on our cover is almost ethereal, wise and kind, his mind as much in the world to come as in this one.” Alfred Bader, in Aldrichimica Acta 19, no. 1 (1986). On several occasions, Bader also referenced the caring relationships evident between protagonists. For example, in reference to Flinck’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman he remarked on “the breathtaking psychological relationship—Jesus’ great care for the woman.” Alfred Bader, Aldrichimica Acta 14, no. 1 (1981): 1. Regarding Lesire’s Tobias Healing His Father (acc. no. 34-020.05) he said that he was “charmed by its obvious human interest: the love and concentration of the son healing his father.” Alfred Bader, in Aldrichimica Acta 1, no. 2 (1968): 2.
Not only did the nature of the exhibited works allow visitors to place their own experiences with solitude or isolation in a broader historical context, the exhibition deliberately created space for audiences to process them in a highly personalized way. At the center of the gallery stood a “reflection room,” where visitors were invited to sit and engage with prompts designed to encourage introspection and to solicit testimony.8This space was co-curated by Associate Curator of Care and Relations, Sebastian De Line, Emma Tow (Queen’s Art History, BA ’22) and myself. At the end of the exhibition’s run, over a thousand creative responses lined the walls of the room—a substantial communal archive that formed a poignant reminder of community amid the ongoing pandemic restrictions as well as the varied and uneven circumstances under which prolonged lockdowns had been experienced.
In tandem with the exhibition, an artist micro-residency program called Studios in Solitude was established, which took up the exhibition’s probe of solitude as both a disruptive force and a site of historic privilege. Its main goal was to meet artists’ needs for solitary contemplation and creativity by matching underutilized programming spaces at Agnes with local artists whose practices were affected by the pandemic, as well as providing financial and in-kind support for newly emerging and ongoing projects. The selected artists, ck nosun, Mariah (Mo) Horner, Shelby Lisk, and Vivian Sheng, represented a variety of perspectives present in the broader Kingston community, including ones historically excluded from cultural institutions, such as Indigenous, immigrant, and anarchist ones. In engaging specifically with local artists and by sharing resources, the residency sought to break down perceived barriers between the museum and its communities while showing actionable solidarity during a precarious time.
Among several outcomes of the Studios in Solitude residency, both Shelby Lisk and Vivian Sheng produced work that was subsequently exhibited at Agnes. In her project Shé:kon se’onhwentsyà:ke ratinékere tsi nihá:ti nè:ne yesanorónhkhwa (there are still people in the world that love you), multidisciplinary artist Lisk created five pairs of earrings for important women in her life, co-designed with their intended recipients to reflect their spirit and personality. The outcomes of these exchanges were documented in a series of photographic portraits, presented as a solo show following the residency (5 March–8 May 2022).9The exhibition was co-curated by myself and Michelle Bunton, and received the Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries award for best monographic exhibition of 2022 with a budget below $20,000. To Lisk, the mutual process of creating both earrings and portraits became a form of honouring relationality, expressing gratitude, and re-establishing connections and community during a time that such relationships felt occluded. In resonance with the concurrent Studies in Solitude exhibition in the Bader Gallery, she invited visitors of her exhibition to sit down at a desk from her childhood home and write letters of appreciation to loved ones. While one exhibition encouraged audiences to look inward, the other explicitly encouraged them to reach out.
Multimedia installation artist Vivian Sheng used a Pepper’s Ghost technique to create a motion-activated holographic projection and sound installation entitled The Chamber. Drawing inspiration from Studies in Solitude’s discussion of the emergence of private study spaces and studiolos across early modern Europe, The Chamber conjured their adjacent specter of confinement as well as longstanding traditions of scholarly retreat in Chinese academic culture. Illusionistic projections and digitally reproduced Renaissance music responded to visitors entering the chamber, prompting them to contemplate the capacity of one’s creative inner world to activate and enliven solitary spaces. As such Sheng and collaborator Claude Sun deliberately subverted the notion, often emphasized in the European visual tradition, that creativity or inspiration was exclusively enabled by such spaces and their material culture. This work, created in partnership with Claude Sun, was featured in the exhibition A Guest + Host = A Ghost (8 February–8 May 2022).10Curated by Sunny Kerr, Neven Lochhead, Michelle Bunton and Dylan Robinson and recipient of the Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries award for best thematic exhibition of the year with a budget under $20,000.
While Lisk’s and Sheng’s works were not on view alongside paintings in the Bader Gallery, they still allowed visitors to draw relationships across Agnes’s ecosystem of exhibitions—each autonomous yet converging on shared themes of solitude and its opposites (connection, community) or adjacencies (isolation, confinement). Rather than functioning as an island onto itself, the European art gallery, within this constellation of exhibitions, thus sought connection to contemporary perspectives that grappled with both an unprecedented global calamity as well as historical and cultural contexts of their own.
Viewing works in The Bader Collection through this lens does not diverge all that much from the way Alfred Bader described their impact during his life. Regarding Hendrick TerBrugghen’s The Weeping Virgin, for instance, Bader commented in 1976: “What we see here is the timeless tragedy of a woman bemoaning man’s inhumanity to man—be this at Golgotha, at Auschwitz, or at My Lai.”11Alfred Bader, in Aldrichimica Acta 8, no. 1 (1976): 1. With the horrors of both the Second World War and Vietnam War fresh in mind, Bader saw a connection between biblical admonishment against malice and the cruelty and injustices of his own time. Other such readings included the lessons offered by paintings of the aforementioned story of Ruth and Naomi, from which Bader drew hope for a resolution to contemporary religious conflicts.12Alfred Bader, in Aldrichimica Acta 8, no. 2 (1975): 1. “Our chemist-collector has confided to us that, whenever he becomes too discouraged by events in the Middle-East, he thinks of the Book of Ruth … Though the Moabites were related to the Jews through Lot, the nephew of Abraham, there was bitter enmity between them after the Exodus from Egypt … Luckily, enmity on that level is often mitigated by the kindness of individuals. It is hard to find a more moving expression of such personal kindness than Ruth’s words to her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi: ‘Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.’ It is surely significant that King David, and hence the Messiah, are direct descendants of Ruth, the Moabite. Maybe there is hope for us yet.” His conviction that art has the ability to powerfully engage with such fundamental human experiences and emotions shaped the contours of The Bader Collection—and has important implications for the work it can enact in a museum context.
While The Bader Collection has been exhibited in its own designated gallery since Agnes’s last extension opened in 2000, its presence in the museum will be more fluid in the context of Agnes Reimagined. The European art collection, like all other collecting areas at Agnes, will no longer be tied to one dedicated gallery, but will instead be presented in varying exhibition spaces, as suited to the changing needs of different exhibition concepts. Supported by expanded galleries, as well as increased room for community programming and artistic residencies, the collection’s new home will also offer more opportunities to activate the collection through transhistoric and cross-cultural conversations.
Examples of this approach were piloted during the exhibition series Collection Count + Care (14 June–4 December 2022) that, at two-week intervals, featured small presentations of just a few works from Agnes’s collection leading up to its anticipated facility closure and related packing of the collection.13Coordinated by Alicia Boutilier. Initiated by Associate Curator Arts of Africa, Dr Qanita Lilla, the installation on view from 12 August to 5 September showed a small Ma Go mask from the Dan in Liberia, paired with several miniatures from the European collection, including Miniature Portrait of a Man from The Bader Collection.14Co-curated by Qanita Lilla and the author.
Brought together in a Victorian-era hat box normally resigned to the Vault, the intimate grouping drew out unexpected similarities between these highly personal items—both their original significance as affectively charged markers of familial bond, typically worn on the body, and their dissonant existence as objects of “unknown makers” in a museum context. The Western terminology long associated with the Ma Go (once referred to as a “passport mask”), as well as the ivory on which one of the miniature portraits was painted, further connected these works to histories of colonial conquest and extraction. Together, they seemed to query: could cultural belongings that at times sit uncomfortably together form new bonds of kinship? What curatorial strategy could creatively guide this process? How can collections and curators be good neighbours to each other within the same, complicated home?
Similar questions could be applied to a later iteration of Collection Count + Care. From 8 to 20 November, Rembrandt van Rijn’s Head of an Old Man in a Cap was on view together with A Teleplasmic Study with Doilies (A Selection) by Scarborough-based artist Erika DeFreitas.15Curated by the author. DeFreitas’s photographs form part of a larger series that documents the artist during a free movement performance using her late grandmother’s handmade doily. The fabric configurations emanating from the artist’s mouth recall the nineteenth-century ectoplasm photographs of the Manitoban doctor T. G. Hamilton (1873–1935). Seeking to document the embodied interaction between mediums and the spiritual world, Hamilton turned to photography—then at the forefront of imaging technology—to capture presences indiscernible to the naked eye.
Concerns that are perhaps not all that different revolve around Head of an Old Man in a Cap. The small panel was studied by researchers from Agnes and Queen’s Master of Art Conservation Program over the course of 2022–2023, utilising various new imaging methods, including scanning macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF), a technique that measures and visualises the distribution of specific elements throughout the paint layers. In the process of this study, an underlying composition was identified, possibly a self-portrait by the young artist—then still in his early twenties—wearing a scarf.16The MA-XRF analysis was carried out by Jocelyn Hillier and Patricia Smithen at Queen’s University. Its results will be discussed in a forthcoming publication. Like DeFreitas’s photographs, the painting revealed itself as a complexly layered object, with tensions between study and portrait, the visible and invisible, surface and depth, self and other, and loss and creation. In turn, the focused pairing of DeFreitas’s work with a painting by an artist long cemented in the Eurocentric canon of art history compelled awareness of the elements of self-portraiture that are present in A Teleplasmic Study with Doilies, and the politics implicated in the choice of a woman of colour and artist to instrumentalise her body as artistic medium. Uniting creative processes along a maternal lineage, DeFreitas’s likeness, however, moves beyond self-image and evokes the capacity of the spiritual medium to function as a portal through which multiple spirits manifest.
Situated on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and Huron-Wendat, it is important to note, furthermore, that Agnes Reimagined will include Indigenous self-determination spaces, and that the work of the Bader Curator of European Art will continue alongside that of the Curator of Indigenous Art and Culture, a position endowed by Bader Philanthropies in 2021. The implications of this significant gift are manifold, but importantly it allows curatorial practice at Agnes to better enact the principles of mutual respect, equality and autonomy promised in the Two Row Wampum, a treaty concluded between Haudenosaunee representatives and Dutch settlers during the same period that many of the paintings in The Bader Collection were created in The Netherlands.17Richard W. Hill Sr. and Daniel Coleman, “The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Tradition as a Guide for Indigenous-University Research Partnerships” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 19 (2019): 339–359.
While Dutch art, and more specifically the religious paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn and his circle, were Alfred Bader’s “first love,” this affection was mediated by a deep sensitivity to human relationality and moral responsibility, which he applied both to his life and collecting activities. These principles have shaped a collection that is not only exceptional for its artistic merit, but also uniquely poised to engage with some of the most pressing questions pursued in the context of Agnes Reimagined: those around equity, individual and shared moral responsibilities, and the enduring significance of human (and more-than-human) relations. Taking to heart Alfred Bader’s hard-won lessons, Agnes will endeavor to embody the values of hospitality and belonging that bonded him to Queen’s University in the first place, and in this spirit align The Bader Collection’s enduring qualities to create a similarly welcoming home for any weary travelers arriving at Queen’s doorstep—in 2026 and beyond.