A collector who backs his own hunches

In July 1994 Geraldine Norman profiled Loder in The Independent as one of Britain’s more offbeat private collectors: someone who ignored the fashion of the contemporary market and went on collecting abstraction after it had left the centre of attention. The occasion was Lead and Follow: the Continuity of Abstraction, an exhibition of his collection at the Atlantis Gallery in Whitechapel. Loder hoped it would help set a rediscovery in motion. He was equally plain about how the works had been gathered. Nearly all the paintings, he told Norman, were bought from the artists themselves rather than selected from galleries. The article presented him as a collector who backed his own hunches — and who treated friendship with artists as part of the work of collecting.