Join Rice's Graham Bader, associate professor and chair of art history, at the Menil Drawing Institute on May 5, 2022 at 7:00pm for his talk "On Drawing: Graham Bader on Kurt Schwitters" as he discusses his recently published book, Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Scwitters Between Revolution and Exile (Yale University Press, 2021).
Bader’s presentation will be followed by a conversation with Edouard Kopp, Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute.
Active as an artist, designer, publisher, performer, critic, poet, and playwright, Kurt 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 Bader explores in his publication, such simple separation of art and life is precisely what Schwitters’s “poisoned abstraction” calls into question.
Graham Bader is the Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Rice University. The author of Hall of Mirrors: Roy Lichtenstein and the Face of Painting in the 1960s (MIT Press, 2010) and editor of October Files: Roy Lichtenstein (MIT Press, 2009), he has published widely on topics across modern and contemporary art. His book Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exile—which rethinks the work of one of the interwar European avant-garde’s most idiosyncratic figures—was published by Yale University Press in fall 2021.