Continuing to work six days a week and traveling to Europe several times each year to buy paintings, Bader has nevertheless managed to find time to write a second volume of his autobiography, this one titled “Alfred Bader: Further Adventures of a Chemist Collector” (The Orion Publishing Group, hardcover, 246 pages, $29.95).
In a recent interview in his offices at the Astor Hotel, Bader spoke with The Chronicle about his life, work and family, as well as his new book.
“The leitmotif of our lives is that we have so much and yet we need so little,” Bader said of himself and his wife Isabel.
Having made a fortune with Aldrich Chemical, later Sigma Aldrich, the world’s largest supplier of research chemicals, he now distributes millions of dollars to charitable causes every year.
And giving away that money is the most difficult of his four jobs he said.
He has three jobs that he enjoys, he said, and one that he does not. Those that he enjoys are buying and selling paintings for Alfred Bader Fine Arts, investing and consulting for chemical companies and giving lectures and writing about both chemicals and art.
The fourth is giving money away sensibly, which is not easy. Bader said. “Not everybody does what they tell you they will do [with the money]. But, my son [Daniel Bader], luckily, helps me. And he’s got 17 good people [working] with him at the Helen Bader Foundation.”
Bader, who bought his house on the East Side of Milwaukee for $27,500 in 1957 — without a mortgage, said that he and Isabel spend very little and could live on their Social Security.
One of the major recipients of the Baders’ largess is the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, to which they give between $1 and $2 million dollars a year.
Another of Bader’s favorite causes is the university he attended as an undergraduate, Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.
In 1941, after being rescued at age 14 from Vienna by the Kindertransport and sent to England, he was imprisoned as an enemy alien. When he was released from the camp in November 1941, he went to McGill University in Montreal, which informed him that its quota for Jewish students was filled. After being further rejected by the University of Toronto, Bader applied and was accepted at Queens University.
“At Queens, I learned that Christians could be very good people. I didn’t know that in Vienna. But I was treated wonderfully well. They didn’t have a Jewish quota. It was very unusual,” Bader said.
Bader has repaid them generously, with “a bit more than $100 million dollars.” He bought them a castle in England, which is used as an international study center, and he will leave his entire personal collection of Rembrandt and Old Master paintings to them as well.
Bader’s new book begins with the drama of his leaving the company he founded, which had merged with the St. Louis-based Sigma company in 1975.
“I knew that something absorbing must take the place of the intense effort I had put into what had been my life’s work. The answer was to become much more deeply involved in art,” he writes.
Bader, who said “Together with my friend Otto Naumann, I have bought and sold more Rembrandts than any dealer alive,” also wrote about his paintings and his work as an art dealer, his family and friends, building a theater in Toronto in his wife’s honor and his philanthropy in support of “the neediest and the ablest.”
Bader devotes a chapter to his friend, Milwaukeean Marvin Klitsner, who died in 2001. Klitsner was “the greatest influence on my business life, and often on my personal life,” Bader writes.
Together, they were involved with the board of directors of Congregation Anshe Sfard and in the founding of Hillel Academy, Bader writes. They also founded the Bader-Klitsner Foundation, “which helped Jewish causes in Milwaukee and Israel, and B&K Enterprises, doing business as Alfred Bader Fine Arts….”
Much of the book follows Bader as he travels the world, buying, selling (and even searching for stolen) art.
“Alfred Bader: Further Adventures of a Chemist Collector” is available at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops
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