Bader collection of paintings by Rembrandt and peers on view at Milwaukee Art Museum
Many works in Milwaukee Art Museum's major new exhibit of paintings by Rembrandt and his contemporaries have biblical subjects, which is one compelling reason to see this show.
Another, explains curator Tanya Paul, is that the 76 works on view end up forming a kind of portrait of the late Alfred Bader, the collector largely responsible for them being in Milwaukee.
"Art, Life, Legacy: Northern European Paintings in the Collection of Isabel and Alfred Bader" opens Friday and continues through Jan. 28.
A successful chemist and businessman whose philanthropies continue to serve Milwaukee, Alfred Bader (1924-2018) avidly collected the paintings of Dutch artists Rembrandt (1606-'69), Jan Lievens (1607-'74) and their Dutch and Flemish peers because of the humanity their pictures conveyed, Paul said during a media preview of the exhibit.
Paul links Bader's passion for paintings of subjects from the Hebrew Bible to his Jewish faith. So she connects Abraham van Dijck's "The Widow of Zarephath and Her Son" (circa 1655), a domestic scene from the miracle of feeding the prophet Elijah, to the generosity Bader learned from his mother.
In "The Angel With Manoah and His Wife" (1617) by Pieter Lastman, who taught both Rembrandt and Lievens, the couple's fingers are interlaced in a touching way, Paul points out in her commentary on the painting. (Manoah was the father of Samson, whose future birth was being announced to a formerly barren couple in this angelic way.) Lastman's painting is one of several works Paul recalls seeing hanging in the Baders' apartment on one of her visits with them.
Abraham Bloemaert's "Jacob's Dream" (circa 1600-'05), which once hung on the Baders' bedroom wall, was the first thing Alfred saw when get out of bed each morning, Paul said. He connected to the period of struggle he experienced as a boy in a prisoner of war camp in Canada, she said.
"Art, Life, Legacy" includes three paintings by Rembrandt plus two Rembrandt-adjacent works whose attribution scholars continue to debate. In discussing one of the show's signature images, the early Rembrandt painting "Head of an Old Man in a Cap" (circa 1630), Paul focused on how the artist applied paint to the canvas. To give the figure convincing "old man eyebrow hair," Paul said jocularly, Rembrandt flipped over his brush and used its tail end to scratch the paint surface.
A portion of this exhibit includes paintings that reflect the Dutch Golden Age, years when Dutch military, economic and cultural power was at its peak. The presence of Black figures in some of the paintings reminds us that the benefits of that golden age weren't equally distributed.
Many paintings in this exhibit belong to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Alfred Bader's alma mater, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Some come from the collection of Isabel Bader. "Art, Life, Legacy" was organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum in collaboration with the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
The art museum has other works collected or donated by the Baders in its permanent collection. The museum has prepared a guide so visitors can see them after looking at "Art, Life, Legacy."
Present Music to perform related concert
In a related program, Present Music will perform live Oct. 29 at the museum to a screening of Hans Karl Breslauer's 1924 silent film "Die Stadt Ohne Juden" ("The City Without Jews"). Some see Breslauer's satirical, expressionist film as a precursor of the Holocaust, because it imagines Jews being scapegoated for the city's economic struggles. Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth created a new score for the film in 2018, mixing live and electronic sounds. Yaniv Dinur will conduct the Present Music ensemble. A pre-concert talk at 6 p.m. precedes the 7:30 p.m. concert. For ticket info, visit presentmusic.org/events or call (414) 229-4308.
If you go
"Art, Life, Legacy: Northern European Paintings in the Collection of Isabel and Alfred Bader" continues through Jan. 28 at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive. For info, visit mam.org .
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Bader collection of paintings by Rembrandt and peers on view at Milwaukee Art Museum
