Dietrich Felix von Bothmer (pronounced BOAT-mare; October 26, 1918 – October 12, 2009) was a German-born American art historian, who spent six decades as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he developed into the world's leading specialist in the field of ancient Greek vases.
Early life and education Bothmer was born in Eisenach, Germany on October 26, 1918. An ardent opponent of the Nazi dictatorship, he attended Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelms University and then Wadham College, Oxford in 1938 on the final Rhodes Scholarship awarded in Germany. There he worked with Sir John Beazley on his books Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters and Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters, working collaboratively to group works by identifying the individual craftsmen and workshops that had created each of hundreds of Greek vases. He graduated in 1939 with a major in classical archaeology.Grimes, William. "Dietrich von Bothmer, Curator and Art Historian, Dies at 90", The New York Times, October 15, 2009. Accessed October 26, 2009.
A tour of museums in the United States in 1939 left Bothmer stuck there with the start of World War II. Due to his strong anti-Nazi sentiments, he refused to return to Germany, and narrowly escaped being sent back to Germany against his will. He earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1944. Though not yet a citizen, in 1943 he volunteered for the United States Army. After 90 days in the U.S. Army, he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in March, 1944. He served in the Pacific theater of operations, earning a Bronze Star Medal and Purple Heart for a conspicuous act of bravery on August 11, 1944, while serving in the South Pacific, where, despite being wounded himself in the thigh, foot, and arm, he recovered a wounded comrade and carried him back three miles through enemy lines.
Career
Following the completion of his military service, Bothmer was hired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946, and was named as a curator in 1959.Staff. "Von Bothmer Gets New Museum Post", The New York Times, July 2, 1959. Accessed October 26, 2009. By 1973, he was department chairman and he was named in 1990 as distinguished research curator.
In 1972, together with the Director, Thomas Hoving, Bothmer argued in favor of the purchase of the Euphronios Krater, a vase used to mix wine with water that dated from the sixth century BCE. They convinced the museum's board to purchase the artifact for $1 million, which the museum funded through the sale of its coin collection. The Government of Italy demanded the object's return, citing claims that the vase had been taken illegally from an ancient Etruscan site near Rome. The krater was one of 20 pieces that the museum sent back to Italy in 2008 in exchange for multi-year loans of ancient artifacts that were put on display at the Met, as part of an agreement reached in 2006.
Bothmer's 1977 exhibit "Thracian Treasures from Bulgaria" covered twenty centuries of Thracian culture, with more than 500 art works dating back to the Copper Age.Barry, Ann. "Arts and Leisure Guide; Arts and Leisure Guide", The New York Times, July 3, 1977. Accessed October 26, 2009. The 1979 show "Greek Art of the Aegean Islands" included 191 pieces, of which 46 came from the Met and a similar number from the Louvre. The remainder came from several different museums in Greece, including the largest known Cycladic sculpture, dating to 2700 to 2300 BCE, on loan from the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.Kramer, Hilton. "Greece and France Join Met in Show Of Aegean Art; Aegean Art In Show At the Met", The New York Times, November 2, 1979. Accessed October 26, 2009. A 1985 exhibition based on his research, "The Amasis Painter and his World: Vase Painting in Sixth Century B.C. Athens," included 65 works of a single artist who created his pottery 2,500 years before, the first to document the history of the work of a single craftsman from that ancient period as a one-man show.Reif, Rita. "Antiques; Lyric World Of An Ancient Painter", The New York Times, October 6, 1985. Accessed October 26, 2009.
Bothmer's numerous published works in the field include the 1957 Amazons in Greek Art,Amazons in Greek Art Ancient Art From New York Private CollectionsAncient Art From New York Private Collections and An Inquiry Into the Forgery of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (with Joseph V. Noble), both published in 1961, Greek Vase Painting: an IntroductionGreek Vase Painting: an Introduction in 1972, his 1985 book The Amasis Painter and His World: Vase-Painting in Sixth-Century B.C. Athens, his 1991 book Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection, and in 1992, Euphronios, peintre: Actes de la journee d'etude organisee par l'Ecole du Louvre et le Departement des antiquites grecques, etrusques de l'Ecole du Louvre (French Edition).Euphronios, peintre: Actes de la journee d'etude organisee par l'Ecole du Louvre et le Departement des antiquites grecques, etrusques de l'Ecole du Louvre (French Edition) He also contributed in 1983 to Wealth of the Ancient World (Hunt Art Collections),Wealth of the Ancient World (Hunt Art Collections) Development of the Attic Black-Figure, Revised Edition (Sather Classical Lectures)Development of the Attic Black-Figure, Revised Edition (Sather Classical Lectures) in 1986, and a wide variety of other publications.
Bothmer took a faculty position in 1965 at the Institute of Fine Arts, the nation's top-ranked graduate program in art history, according to the National Research Council's 1994 study.
Bothmer spoke and wrote seven languages: German; English; French; Italian; Latin; and Modern and Ancient Greek.
Awards and citations
Bothmer was a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, the French order established in 1802. It is the highest decoration in France.
Bothmer was elected in 1988 to the Institute de France, the French learned society founded in 1795. He was a member of its Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Only two Americans can be in it at any one time.
Bothmer was elected a member of The Académie française (one of only two Americans to have this honor) as an Associé (only French citizens can be Academicians), in 1997. The Académie comprises forty members, known as les immortels ("the immortals"). New members are elected by the members of the Académie itself. The Académie Française, also known as the French Academy, is the principal French council for matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII.
He was also an honorary fellow of Wadham College, and the recipient of several honorary doctorates.
Complementing his career as a curator and an academic, he served on the Art Advisory Council of the International Foundation for Art Research.International Foundation for Art Research, about IFAR
Major publications
Attic Black-figured Pelikai 1951
Amazons in Greek Art 1957
Greek Vases from the Hearst Collection 1957
Ancient Art From New York Private Collections: Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art December 17, 1959-February 28, 1960 1961
An Inquiry Into the Forgery of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1961
Andokides the Potter and the Andokides Painter 1966
Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: Attic Black-Figured Neck-Amphorae 1976
Thracian: Treasures from Bulgaria 1977
Greek Art of the Aegean Islands 1979
The Search for Alexander: Supplement to the Catalogue 1983
The Amasis Painter and His World: Vase-Painting in Sixth-Century B.C. Athens 1986
Greek Vase Painting 1987
Wealth of the Ancient World: Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt Collections 1987
Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection 1990
Books related to
The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece, by Vernon Silver
Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Thomas Hoving
The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase, by Nigel Spivey
Bernard V. Bothmer, Egyptologist in the Making, 1912 Through July 1946: With Bothmer's Own Account of His Escape from Central Europe in October 1941 (Investigatio Orientis), by Marianne Eaton-Krauss
Essays in Honor of Dietrich von Bothmer. Two volumes: Text & Plates. Allard Pierson Series Volume 14, by Andrew J. Clark and Jasper Gaunt, eds.
Artifact origin controversy Law enforcement and some archaeologists now believe that several of von Bothmer's many acquisitions of pottery fragments had illicit origins. Pieces of an Attic kylix were acquired over a 16-year period from a series of buyers, with some fragments acquired from Bothmer that completed the piece and allowed it to be fully reassembled. Prosecutors cite the improbability of being able to collect so many shards from the same artifact from disparate sources, and the fact that von Bothmer personally knew the seller of each shard of pottery that was later combined to restore the Kylix."The Kylix Marvel: Why Experts Distrust the Story of an Ancient Cup's Rebirth", The New York Times, April 19, 2023. Accessed April 19, 2023. "A fourth, it turned out, was Dietrich von Bothmer, who for decades served as chief curator of Greek and Roman artifacts at the Met. After he purchased the other fragments for the museum, von Bothmer surprisingly found shards in his own private collection that nearly completed the piece, including the final fragment he gave to the Met in 1994."
List of publications
1941
“Greek Pottery from Tell en-Nasbeh,” Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research 83 (1941) 25-30.
1944
Amazons in Greek Art, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1944.
“The Painters of ‘Tyrrhenian’ Vases,” AJA 48 (1944) 161-70.
1946
Review of H. Bloesch, Antike Kunst in der Schweiz; Fünfzig Meisterwerke aus dem klassischen Altertum in öffentlichem und privatem Besitz (Erlenbach-Zürich 1943), in AJA 50 (1946) 495-97.
1947
“Greek Pottery,” in C.C. McCown ed., Tell en-Nasbeh; Excavated under the Direction of the late William Frederic Badé (Berkeley 1947) 175-78, 304.
“An Amphora of the Polyphemus Group,” BMMA 5 no. 5 (January 1947) 131-35.
“The Taleides Amphora,” BMMA 5 no. 9 (May 1947) 221-26 (with “Notes on the Inscriptions” by M.J. Milne, 226-28).
1948
“An Attic Black-figured Dinos,” BMFA 46 no. 264 (June 1948) 42-48.
1949
“The Classical Contribution to Western Civilization,” BMMA 7 no. 8 (April 1949) 205-19.
“Recent Accessions of Greek Terracotta Vases,” BMMA 8 no. 3 (November 1949) 91-96.
“The Arming of Achilles,” BMFA 47 no. 270 (December 1949) 84-90.
1950
Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities: An Exhibition from the Collection of Walter Cummings Baker, Esq., Held at the Century Association, New York, May 17 to September 25, 1950 (New York 1950).
Review of B. Neutsch, G. Hafner, and H. Luschey, Die Welt der Griechen; im Bilde der Originale der Heidelberger Universitätssammlung : Katalog der Jubiläumsausstellung zur 100-Jahr-Feier der Sammlungen des Archäologischen Instituts Heidelberg im Sommersemester 1948 (Heidelberg 1948), in AJA 54 (1950) 282-83.
Review of E. Kunze, Neue Meisterwerke griechischer Kunst aus Olympia (Munich1948), in AJA 54 (1950) 283.
Review of D.K. Hill, Catalogue of Classical Bronze Sculpture in the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore 1949), in The Classical Weekly 44 no. 4 (December 1950) 58-59.
1951
“Attic Black-figured Pelikai,” JHS 71 (1951) 40-47.
“Enkaustes Agalmaton,” BMMA 9 no. 6 (February 1951) 156-61.
Review of W. Schmalenbach, Griechische Vasenbilder (Basel 1948), in AJA 55 (1951) 117.
Review of J.W. Graham, Black-figure and Red-figure Greek Pottery (Toronto 1950), in AJA 55 (1951) 433.
1952