Alfred Bader Books

Born in Vienna, Alfred Bader fled to England at the age of fourteen, ten months before the outbreak of World War II. Although a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, he was interned in 1940, along with other 'enemy aliens', and sent to a Canadian prisoner-of-war camp.Obtaining his release in 1941, he was accepted at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he studied engineering chemistry. There followed a fellowship in organic chemistry at Harvard. He worked in Milwaukee as a research chemist for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company and in 1951 co-founded Aldrich, which today, as Sigma-Aldrich, is the world's largest supplier of research chemicals.He spent forty years building Aldrich's distinctive reputation, and the extraordinary story of how he was eventually thrown off the board of Sigma-Aldrich will be of key interest to people in the chemical industry worldwide, as well as to students of business.After leaving Sigma-Aldrich, he continued a fruitful career as an art collector and dealer, and he has some very pertinent and amusing things to say about his experiences in the art world.

Alfred Bader's achievements—as the founder of one of the most important companies in its field in the world, as a collector and dealer in Old Master paintings, and as a legendary philanthropist—make for fascinating reading. This book begins where Alfred Bader's first autobiography, Adventures of a Chemist Collector , with the boardroom coup in which he was dismissed from the chemical company he had built up from the ground. Bader now turns his enormous energy to Old Master paintings, in which he had become interested at a young age and in which he by now has the means to invest. The chapters that follow are roughly chronological, with some devoted to particularly meaningful paintings or groups of paintings, memorable auctions, mysteries, or discoveries relating to the artworks in the Bader Collection, while others are dedicated to friends, family, love, religion, charity, and, occasionally, chemistry.

Le savant, l'artiste et le fou peuvent-ils se réunir autour d'une même table? Ont-ils des choses à se dire? Peuvent-ils s'enrichir mutuellement? Un dialogue entre hommes de science et gens de lettres, artistes et personnes confrontées à la folie, a-t-il un sens? Et quelle est la part de la créativité et surtout de l'esthétique dans l'évolution des idées contemporaines? Ce volume restitue fidèlement les exposés et les débats du «Symposium francophone pluridisciplinaire sur la dynamique esthétique dans l'art, la folie et la science» qui s'est tenu à Lausanne en juin 1985. Les organisateurs, A. Bader et G. Salem, ont voulu donner une forme durable à une rencontre qui a passionné orateurs et auditeurs.