About

Graham Bader is a Professor and Chair of Art History at Rice University, where he focuses his research and teaching on postwar European and American art, with particular emphasis on the avant-gardes of early twentieth-century Europe, especially Germany. His scholarly work includes the publication of the book Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exile, published by Yale University Press in 2021, which rethinks the work of the idiosyncratic Dada artist Kurt Schwitters by combining close analysis of specific works with a detailed examination of the historical context, aiming to reframe understanding of Schwitters’s practice and the complex relationship between art, politics, and history in the modern period. Bader is also the author of Hall of Mirrors: Roy Lichtenstein and the Face of Painting in the 1960s and has edited works on Roy Lichtenstein, alongside numerous essays on artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Thomas Struth, and Kazimir Malevich, among others. His work consistently seeks to explore the intricate interrelations between artworks and the social and political fields in which they are created, viewing works of art as materialized theories rooted in specific historical conditions. Bader’s approach integrates formal analysis, historical research, and theoretical inquiry, emphasizing their inseparability in understanding art and history.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Art
• Philosophy
• Art history
• Epistemology
• Visual arts
• World Wide Web
• Library science
• Computer graphics (images)
• Aesthetics
• History

Selected publications

• Conclusion: Precarious

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Conclusion: PrecariousGraham BaderPoisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exilen October 2010, as my thinking about this book was in its earliest stages, Houston's Menil Collection opened the exhibition Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage. Including roughly one hundred of the artist's works...AuthorGraham BaderPublisherYale University PressCopyright© 2021 by Graham BaderRelated print edition pages: pp.195-201 https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00317.6 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22637Copy Chapter subject tags:Schwitters, Kurt, 1887-1948Installations (Art)World War, 1914-1918Art--Political aspectsHirschhorn, Thomas

  PublisherDOI

• 3. Photographic Memory: The Merzbau

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Art history
  • Computer Science

  3. Photographic Memory: The MerzbauGraham BaderPoisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and ExileThis chapter takes as its subject what is undoubtedly Schwitters's most significant, and significantly discussed, work: the Merzbau. Destroyed in a British bombing raid in October 1943...AuthorGraham BaderPublisherYale University PressCopyright© 2021 by Graham BaderRelated print edition pages: pp.121-161 https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00317.4 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22635Copy Chapter subject tags:Schwitters, Kurt, 1887-1948. MerzbauArt and photographySculpture, AbstractDocumentary photographyMemory in art

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• "1. Revolutionary Aesthetics: The Invention of Merz, 1918–19"

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Art history
  • Aesthetics

  1. Revolutionary Aesthetics: The Invention of Merz, 1918–19Graham BaderPoisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and ExileHow does one make art in, and from, and of, revolution? To ask this set of questions is to probe the fundamental substance of avant-garde aesthetics...AuthorGraham BaderPublisherYale University PressCopyright© 2021 by Graham BaderRelated print edition pages: pp.17-73 https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00317.2 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22633Copy Chapter subject tags:Schwitters, Kurt, 1887-1948Germany--History--Revolution, 1918DadaismWalden, Herwarth, 1878-1941Art, Abstract

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• Introduction: Schwitters’s Gift

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Introduction: Schwitters's GiftGraham BaderPoisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and ExileThe primary achievement of Kurt Schwitters's art, the critic Walter Mehring wrote in an August 1919 review, was to utilize "objects themselves to achieve an objectless pictorial whole...AuthorGraham BaderPublisherYale University PressCopyright© 2021 by Graham BaderRelated print edition pages: pp.1-15 https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00317.1 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22632Copy Chapter subject tags:Schwitters, Kurt, 1887-1948Found objects (Art)Art, AbstractCollage, GermanArt--Political aspects

  PublisherDOI

• Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exile

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2021-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding

  "This fascinating book offers a definitive new assessment of the oeuvre of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), a central figure of the interwar European avant-garde. Active as an artist, designer, publisher, performer, critic, poet, and playwright, Schwitters is best known for intimately scaled, materially rich collages and assemblages made from found objects-- often refuse-- that the artist described as having lost all contact with their role and history in the world at large. But as Graham Bader explores, such simple separation of art from life is precisely what Schwitters's "poisoned abstraction" calls into question"--Publisher's description

  PublisherDOI

• 4. Merz Away from Home: Schwitters’s Exilic Imagination

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  4. Merz Away from Home: Schwitters's Exilic ImaginationGraham BaderPoisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and ExileIn 1931, around the time he began to develop the Merzbau as an integrated environment and in the same year he first publicized the Cathedral of Erotic Misery in "Me and My Goals," Schwitters completed his plywood assemblage...AuthorGraham BaderPublisherYale University PressCopyright© 2021 by Graham BaderRelated print edition pages: pp.163-193 https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00317.5 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22636Copy Chapter subject tags:Schwitters, Kurt, 1887-1948Exile (Punishment)Collage, GermanNationalism

  PublisherDOI

• 2. Schwitters’s Ink: Picturing Words in the 1920s

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Art history
  • Art

  2. Schwitters's Ink: Picturing Words in the 1920sGraham BaderPoisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and ExileArguably no element was more central to Merz than language. From the infinitely varied textual scraps filling his collages, to the semantic gymnastics...AuthorGraham BaderPublisherYale University PressCopyright© 2021 by Graham BaderRelated print edition pages: pp.75-119 https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00317.3 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22634Copy Chapter subject tags:Schwitters, Kurt, 1887-1948Advertising layout and typographyCollage, GermanArt, AbstractInk industry

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• Kurt Schwitters' Resonant Objects: Matter and Politics in Early Merz

  2019-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Examining a selection of 1919 works by the German artist Kurt Schwitters, this essay argues that the artist’s early forays into collage and assemblage (what he dubbed ‘Merz’) can be understood as material instantiations of essential political questions at the time of their making. Above all, Schwitters sought in his works to concretize, and thus open for creative questioning and play, the processes by which people and things are defined, given value, and merged into integrated wholes. To pursue this argument—which is positioned in relation to the structuring binary of Charles W. Haxthausen’s 1999 Clark Art Institute Conference ‘The Two Art Histories’—the essay looks closely at Schwitters’ material components and techniques, and considers his negotiation, in the immediate wake of World War I, of the competing aesthetic programs of Berlin Dada and Herwarth Walden’s Sturm gallery.

  OA PDF

• The Resonant Object: A tribute to Charles W. Haxthausen

  The Journal of Art Historiography · 2019-12-01

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  Publisher

• Reinventing Vision, Page by Page

  Art History · 2018-03-15

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Frequent coauthors

• Pierpont Morgan Library

  1 shared

• Elizabeth Mangini

  1 shared

• Sikkema Jenkins Co.

  1 shared

• Galerie Max Hetzler

  1 shared

• Victoria Sancho Lobis

  1 shared

• Arturo González Herrera

  1 shared

• Andrés Mario Zervigón

  1 shared

• Amy Hamlin

  Baylor College of Medicine

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Humboldt Stiftung Fellow (2012-2013)
• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Columbia University (2005-20…