Fred. Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam, Netherlands
Bas Jan Ader took art lessons at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.
Young Bas Jan Ader.
9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA
Ader graduated from the Otis College of Art and Design in 1965 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
150 E 10th St, Claremont, CA 91711, USA
In 1967 Bas Jan Ader completed his education at the Claremont Graduate University.
1967
Claremont, California, United States
Bas Jan Ader at his Master of Fine Arts exhibition Implosion, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, 1967.
1971
Bas Jan Ader, film still from Nightfall.
Bas Jan Ader reading a book.
Portrait of Bas Jan Ader.
1967
Claremont, California, United States
Bas Jan Ader at his Master of Fine Arts exhibition Implosion, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, 1967.
1971
Bas Jan Ader, film still from Nightfall.
Fred. Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam, Netherlands
Bas Jan Ader took art lessons at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.
9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA
Ader graduated from the Otis College of Art and Design in 1965 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
150 E 10th St, Claremont, CA 91711, USA
In 1967 Bas Jan Ader completed his education at the Claremont Graduate University.
Bas Jan Ader reading a book.
Portrait of Bas Jan Ader.
Young Bas Jan Ader.
Ader was born in Winschoten, Netherlands, on April 19, 1942. He was the son of Bastiaan Jan Ader, minister in the Dutch Reformed church, and his wife Johanna Adriana Ader-Appels. His father was caught harbouring Jewish refugees in 1944 and, for that reason, he was killed by German Nazi soldiers. Bas Jan Ader was just two at that time and would go on to be raised with his younger brother by their widowed mother.
Bas Jan Ader took art lessons at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and then in the United States during his study abroad program. Though often truant and a poor student, he showed enough artistic promise.
He left for Europe in 1961 and spent the next few years travelling through Spain and Morocco. In Morocco Ader was hired to the crew of an Englishman’s yacht and set sail back to the United States. These 11 months at sea had a lasting effect on Ader and breathed interest and love of sailing in the young man.
While in California, Ader graduated from the Otis College of Art and Design in 1965 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and in 1967 from the Claremont Graduate University.
In 1961 Ader exhibited his artworks for the first time at three galleries in Washington, D.C. and received a positive review in The Washington Post. Then Bas Jan Ader taught art at various institutions, including Mt. San Antonio College, Immaculate Heart College, and the University of California, Irvine.
In 1969-1970 he together with his friend William Leavitt anonymously published the satirical conceptual art magazine Landslide. It featured "interviews" with nonexistent artists, including "Brian Shitart", and pranks such as "expandable sculpture", which actually was five packing peanuts in an envelope.
In 1970 he entered the most productive period of his career as an artist, starting with his first film, which showed him seated on a chair, tumbling from the roof of his two-story house in the Inland Empire. During his lifetime, the artist had one-man exhibitions at the Chouinard Art School, Los Angeles (1970), the Pomona College Museum of Art (1972), and the galleries Art & Project, Amsterdam (1972), Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven, Germany (1972, 1974) and the Claire S. Copley Gallery.
Bas Jan Ader had a two-person exhibition together with William Leavitt at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design (1972), as well as a number of group exhibitions in Europe and the United States with such artists as Leavitt, Jack Goldstein, Allen Ruppersberg, Ger van Elk, Gilbert & George, John Baldessari, and Marcel Broodthaers. In addition, his works were included in the prominent international survey exhibitions Prospekt ’71: Projektion at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1971), and Sonsbeek ’71, Groningen, Holland. (1971).
Bas Jan Ader started his work on "In search of the miraculous (One night in Los Angeles)" in 1973, the title was a reference to P.D. Ouspensky's mystical book In Search of the Miraculous. His artwork was a three-part series of photographs showing a lonely figure wandering through the night in Los Angeles, searching everywhere with a torchlight. It was the first part of a triptych. The second part included the record of his Atlantic crossing. The third part was similar to the first; it was a nighttime search somewhere in the Netherlands, which was also recorded in a series of photographs.
Ader had found a choir to sing sea shanties at a gallery in Los Angeles before his departure from Cape Cod. A similar performance was planned upon his arrival in a museum in Groningen, Netherlands. The voyage was to be the central part of his series; it was a daring attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a 13 ft (4.0 m) sailboat. He estimated that it would take him 60 days to make this trip, or 90 if he chose not to use the sail. Nine months after his departure, his boat was found, half-submerged off the coast of Ireland, but Bas Jan's body wasn't there. Because of his loss at sea in 1975, the triptych "In search of the miraculous" was never completed.
Bas Jan Ader was one of the most unique representatives of the world of art in the 20th century. His works have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums.
After his disappearance, Ader's work has been displayed in one-man exhibitions at institutions worldwide including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1988), the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993), the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994), the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2000), Portikus, Frankfurt (2003), and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2004).
Erika Yeomans' conceptual documentary In Search of Bas Jan's Miraculous (1998), which was based on Ader's life and art was featured on This American Life in 1996.
In 2006, Camden Arts Centre in London organized a European retrospective of his artworks which travelled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and the Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland.
Bas Jan Ader became a source of inspiration for Rene Daalder, digital movie pioneer, who proposed a new genre of art called Gravity Art in 2008. It is based on the idea of gravity as a medium. Ader is seen as the one of the founders of this genre for the topics of falling and letting go in his artworks.
In addition, a documentary film about the life and work of Bas Jan Ader titled Here Is Always Somewhere Else came out in 2007.
Bas Jan Ader became one of the invited artists of the 57th Venice Biennale, which took place in 2017.
Ader's parents were followers of Calvinism.
Quotations:
"I want to do a piece where I go to the Alps and talk to a mountain. The mountain will talk of things which are necessary and always true, and I shall talk of things which are sometimes, accidentally true."
"Do you know something? Tequila, if it’s good, and if you’ve had enough of it, tastes almost like the gin Genever that we have in Holland."
"Who will fight the bear? No one? Then the bear has won."
Bas Jan Ader met his future wife Mary Sue Andersen, the daughter of the director of the school, at Otis Art Institute. They married in Las Vegas.
