From the museum website, 2 September 2009
The many paintings donated to the Art Centre by Drs Alfred and Isabel Bader of Milwaukee over the past 40 years already constitute one of the foremost public collections of European historical art in Canada. For some time, Alfred and Isabel Bader have cultivated a vision of bringing the rest of their private collection to Queen’s to join these donations and to form a new entity: the Bader Collection. As part of the Art Centre’s 50th anniversary celebrations, this exhibition will juxtapose selected works from both collections, providing a preview of the scope and quality of the future combined holdings. These pairings will demonstrate the rich interplay of interests and insights linking these works, at the same time drawing back the curtain on the motivations and principles behind these remarkable acquisitions, whose history, dating back to 1950, runs nearly parallel to that of the Art Centre.