A Memoir of Franz and Virginia Bader

By Richard Conroy

Let's talk first about Franz:

Franz saw beauty in the rust on an old piece of iron. He saw it in ice frozen on his windowpane, in fallen leaves washed along a gutter, for he was, among many things, a photographer with a natural eye.

Franz also saw beauty in the imagination of a forty-year-old painter, or perhaps a sculptor, someone waiting for the encouragement, like a camera's lens, to bring it forth. All this is why Franz was, above all, an art dealer, one who brought the artist to the patron.

Franz, the man, was, in an odd way, beautiful: homely as flaking paint on an old, upturned rowboat, fat, short, but beautiful, with his egg-bald head gestating above a tangled nest of white hair anchored by his rabbinical beard, that concealed his necktie-or the lack of it. I was never quite sure.

Franz was born in Vienna in 1903, when that wonderful city was the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and one of the best places in the world to be. The First World War had not yet led to the breakup of the empire into small countries that would include a separate, and greatly troubled, twentieth-century Austria.

For more than a century the empire was hospitable to Jews, and the Emperor knighted Franz's great-uncle for his work on the Suez Canal. Franz's father had a large flour enterprise, and it was expected that, in time, Franz would join him in the business. But Franz's grandfather recognized something else in the young man, and gave him for his bar mitzvah fifty volumes of the classics of literature. This changed his life. In his old age Franz said to me, "I could not see why I should spend my life making bread more expensive for people."

So it was that Franz studied and apprenticed and became a bookseller in Vienna. But books were not his only interest, for his mother was a painter, and he went each Sunday to see the great art museums with which Vienna was, and is, so richly endowed. Later, he would marry an artist, as well.

In the mid-thirties, Franz became proprietor of the oldest bookstore in Vienna, the Wallishausser'sche Buchhandlung, established in 1789. It specialized in books on the arts and theater, and published books, as well. But Franz was not to have the store for very long. Hitler and his Nazi troops occupied Austria in March of 1938, and Franz, like many Jews, was forced to give up his business.

Franz readily understood that there was no future for him in Austria, so he and his wife Antonia, known as Tony, applied to immigrate to America. It seemed hopeless. Many of Vienna's 220,000 Jews were trying to do the same thing, and many were ahead of the Baders. Even the replies to his requests for sponsorship were discouraging. One New York man wrote, "I have sent your letter to my cousin in Australia, as they do not already have too many German Jews there." Franz was jailed for a time, as were many of his friends, but then he was set free, he didn't know why.

However, one of Franz's customers was an American, a friend of the noted Scottish biographer, Edwin Muir, and Muir knew someone in the American Booksellers' Association who knew James Whyte, who had an interest in modern art and was about to open a bookstore in Washington. So it was that Franz got the necessary sponsorship, although he and Tony still lacked their immigration quota numbers.

Franz and Tony had gone often to see the American Consul. He could give them little hope of getting two of the few immigration quota numbers. Quotas were established for the demands of normal times, and made no allowance for saving a whole people. Now the waiting list for America was filled with the names of Austrians seeking refuge.

At first Hitler had said to the Jews, "Go," and those who could, went east or west, wherever there was a place to take them. But another thought was forming in Hitler's mind, what might be done with the Jews. The door for leaving Austria was rapidly closing.

One day, on yet another visit to the American consul, the Baders found him engaged in returning two quota numbers to Washington for re-allocation. Perhaps the intended immigrants had TB, or maybe no sponsor, or they may have decided that the madness could not last and chosen not to abandon all that they possessed. Whatever the reason, it made possible the consul's impulse, when he said, "here," to the Baders and they were soon on their way to America.

Franz and Tony gave up everything except their lives. "We both came out with $12 each-- that is all that was permitted. No new clothes, no quantity of anything else. And my mother gave us a bottle of rum-- for tea actually. And at the border, the Nazi guards said again you want to smuggle out something, so they took it away." Franz was fond of saying that after he was able to get to America, "All those things were completely against any kind of logic and possibility. So much that I felt afterward that if I go over the street and the light is red, then so what, the cars will stop because I go by."

Franz found Washington very different from Vienna: "On the first days, someone took me out for lunch and I ordered some pork and potatoes and rice. `But Franz, you will die, you have to eat some green vegetables!' Never, ever anybody told me in Vienna about green vegetables. Never anybody told me about heat and humidity."

In Washington, Franz soon arranged with Mr. Whyte to sell modern art in the bookstore. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, mentioned Franz in her syndicated newspaper column, "My Day." She had come to one of the exhibitions at the Whyte gallery, and didn't like it, but she came back and changed her mind.

Franz continued to sell foreign language books throughout the Second World War. The Soviet Embassy came to him for maps of Munich. Speaking of his German trade, Franz said, "The reason why I carried German Books, showed Austrian and German artists, for which actually I was sometimes attacked by other refugees, as I was, the reason is, that I feel that people who have gone through war, concentration camps, persecutions and so on, have a right to do something, not a right but a duty, and doing something doesn't mean hatred. If someone wants to hate, it's fine, but hatred always brings hatred back. And I think, I have no children, but people who have children, people like this should have a right to live a life without fear, or with less fear, and if people understand each other, in music, in literature, and in art, and respect each other, it may be a little more difficult to kill each other." In 1964, the German Government presented Franz the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit, being unaware, we presume, where the Russians got their maps of Munich during the war. More than two decades later Austria awarded Franz the Gold Medal for Public Service.

A few years after the war, Franz was able to open his own art gallery and foreign language bookstore. Speaking of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, Franz said, "She was one of my favorite customers. She was the greatest book reader I've ever seen.... She came in at least once a week. We had always a little shelf for her of books we thought she might like. Take Rachael Carson, she read all night and at nine o'clock the next morning she phoned her for more information. I have never seen anyone more intellectual. She published an anthology of poetry. She said she knows poetry because if she has to go somewhere by land and she is driving, she gets bored and she recites poetry."

Of the gallery, Franz said, "Washington artists were our artists because there was nowhere else to show even if they wanted to. A number of people like Prentiss Taylor, Paul Howell, Alice Acheson [wife of Secretary of State Dean Acheson], Bernice Cross and maybe two or three other ones, started at that time and they are still with me," Franz said a quarter of a century later. Franz gave Grandma Moses her first Washington show. And, "Take Lowell Nesbitt, I was eating in a Yugoslav restaurant and there were some prints of his that I liked, so I sent him a message and so I had the first exhibition of his work. From this exhibition, he [was acquired by] the Rosendorf collection." Another of Franz's discoveries was the noted African American artist, Alma Thomas; he presented her first show in a commercial gallery. The list of artists whose careers owe much to Franz is a long one, and to name a few: Ken Noland, Jim Davis, Herman Maurer, Mitchell Jamieson, Ken Young, Dorothy Phillips, Peter Milton, Lester Cooke, H. I. Gates, Berthold and Slaithong Schmutzhart. Franz's support for art was unexpectedly wide ranging, including German painter Anita Bucherer, Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, the art of the Inuit Eskimos in the far north of Canada, and the folk art of Haiti, introduced by Franz in 1946, ahead of the wave of Haitian art popularity. Among the potters Franz displayed, none was more eminent than fellow Austrian refugees Otto and Gertrud Natzler. And lest one forget, Franz introduced more than a few writers to Washington. The late poet, Dylan Thomas, comes to mind.

Tony Bader died in 1966, and Franz slipped deeper into the work of his gallery, marking time for some years until Virginia Forman came upon the scene.

About Virginia:

They were an unexpected but perfect match. He, outgoing, intuitive, a dumpling of a man past middle age; she, perhaps not shy but not outgoing either, tall and willowy, and not yet in her middle years. But they were matched in intellectual curiosity, in social conscience, and in some odd way, they were perfectly complementary.

Virginia was orphaned as a child and raised in boarding schools. She had a scholarly turn of mind. The marriage of Franz and Virginia in 1971 at the home of Mrs. Harold Ickes, widow of the great New Deal Secretary of Interior, brought together a remarkable aggregation of people, sharing interests but ranging high and low in the spectrum of fame and fortune.

This wedding party seemed to go on and on, meeting a dozen or more times a year, until in time it became a Washington artistic and intellectual salon like no other. It was a salon that did not seem to age. Over the years, the number of us who drew sustenance from the Baders increased until the very end, a widening circle. We all regret its passing and do not expect to see its like again. Surprisingly, since Virginia was the more retiring marriage partner, it was she who brought Franz out into the new interests and pursuits that enriched his last years. Franz's photography blossomed. Franz photographed the moon shots at Cape Kennedy. Virginia hired a balloon for Franz on his eightieth birthday so he could ascend to make photographs of the fall foliage.

Together, they traveled the world, Virginia making the plans and keeping detailed records, and Franz using his eyes trained in a lifetime of art, to capture each new impression: elephants at sundown in an African water hole; a backcountry river in Belize; mists in the Maritime Provinces of Canada; exquisite light and shadow on buildings of the Greek islands; tile-work in Tashkent; landscapes in China; and even pictures as simple as a Baltimore street scene reflected and distorted in a glass-walled hotel. These are images conjured up by Virginia and captured by Franz that will ever invest our memories.

As Franz grew older, he felt the need to have something continue on after him, and that was his vision of the aesthetic riches that could be found in the places that too few people looked. It was for this, that he and Virginia decided to establish a fund to help older artists to bring their gifts to the world.

Franz died in 1994 and Virginia died in 2001. Curious to the last, Virginia was packing for a trip to London when she succumbed. Nevertheless, as long as any of us remain who had the great fortune to play a small part in the lives of Virginia and Franz Bader, they will still be very much alive.

Washington, with its many museums, has long been a final resting place for great art, but before the Bader Gallery, the city took little part in artistic creation. Those with long memories have seen how Franz, after his arrival in Washington more than sixty years ago, changed the city in a very real way. Once there were no commercial art galleries, and now there are many.

Once, few serious artists lived and worked in our city and those who did relied upon the emerging galleries of New York to bring their work to the public. Franz changed all that. More than anyone else, Franz made it possible for artists to live and create and to draw strength from one another without leaving Washington. For the ordinary citizen, the Bader Gallery and those that were to follow, made it possible to see new directions in creativity before art has been examined, weighed, and found acceptable by museum curators.

[The authors gratefully acknowledge the Archives of American Art for permission to quote from a taped interview with Franz Bader conducted by the Archives of American Art in 1978. Bader's reminiscences are augmented by the authors' own recollections.]