New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: October 15, 2009
Dietrich von Bothmer, who was regarded by art historians as the world’s leading expert on ancient Greek vases and who was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than 60 years, died in Manhattan on Monday. He was 90 and lived in Manhattan and Oyster Bay, N.Y.The death was confirmed by his son, Bernard von Bothmer.
Dr. von Bothmer (pronounced BOAT-mare) made his reputation working with the legendary Sir John Beazley, his teacher at Oxford. Together, in an extraordinary display of research and connoisseurship, they identified the individual hands and workshops behind hundreds of Greek vases, transforming the understanding of ancient Greek art.
After taking up a curatorial post at the Met in 1946, Dr. von Bothmer continued this work of attribution, which he presented to the public in “The Amasis Painter and His World,” the first one-man show of an artist from the ancient world.
As the Met’s curator of Greek and Roman Art he acquired many of the museum’s most valuable works. One in particular, acquired in 1972, embroiled him in one of the Met’s longest-running disputes. With Thomas P. F. Hoving, then the Met’s director, he persuaded the museum’s board to pay $1 million for a Greek vase known as the Euphronios krater, named for its maker.
Evidence soon came to light suggesting that the vase had been looted from an Etruscan site just north of Rome, and for the next 30 years the Italian government campaigned for its return. After resisting for decades, the Met gave back the vase in January 2008.
Evidence soon came to light suggesting that the vase had been looted from an Etruscan site just north of Rome, and for the next 30 years the Italian government campaigned for its return. After resisting for decades, the Met gave back the vase in January 2008.
“Dietrich von Bothmer was the greatest connoisseur of Greek art of his generation, and the most important and productive classical curator of the 20th century in the United States,” said Jasper Gaunt, the curator of Greek and Roman art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. “He was an institution in his own right.”
Dietrich Felix von Bothmer was born on Oct. 26, 1918, in Eisenach, Germany and studied at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin. In 1938, after receiving the last Rhodes scholarship awarded in Germany, he went to Wadham College, Oxford, where he began collaborating on the attributive work that led to Beazley’s groundbreaking “Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters” and “Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters.”
After earning a degree in classical archaeology from Oxford in 1939, Dr. von Bothmer traveled to the United States to tour museums. With the outbreak of World War II, he found himself unable to return. He enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a doctorate in 1944.
He served with the Army in the South Pacific, where he received a Bronze Star and Purple Heart for bravery after carrying a wounded soldier through enemy lines while wounded himself.
At the Met, where he began as a curatorial assistant in 1946, he was named curator in 1959, department chairman in 1973 and distinguished research curator in 1990.
At the Met, where he began as a curatorial assistant in 1946, he was named curator in 1959, department chairman in 1973 and distinguished research curator in 1990.
Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Met, said: “He added to the collection in a great many areas but most dynamically in Greek vases. The Met now has one of the world’s greatest collections.”
Dr. von Bothmer’s exhibitions at the museum included “Thracian Treasures From Bulgaria” (1977), “Greek Art of the Aegean Islands” (1979-80) and “The Search for Alexander” (1982-83). In 1999 the museum named its two main galleries of classical pottery the Bothmer Gallery I and Bothmer Gallery II in honor of Dr. von Bothmer and his wife, who endowed them.
The Euphronios krater placed Dr. von Bothmer at the center of a firestorm. The vase, used to mix wine and water for banquets, dated to the sixth century B.C. Restored from fragments, it was decorated with a scene of Athenian youths arming themselves for battle and an episode from the Trojan War showing Sarpedon, a son of Zeus, being lifted from the battlefield by the gods of sleep and death.
Dr. von Bothmer regarded the vase as the acquisition of a lifetime. To finance its purchase, the Met sold off most of its coin collection, provoking outrage among museum professionals and archaeologists. Dr. von Bothmer waved off criticism, saying he was only interested in the krater’s quality and genuineness. “Why can’t people look at it simply as archeologists do, as an art object?” he asked.
In 2006 the Met agreed to return the vase to Italy, with four other vessels and 15 pieces of Hellenistic silver, in return for the long-term loan of other classical antiquities.
In 1966 Dr. von Bothmer married Joyce Blaffer de la Bégassière. In addition to his son, Bernard, of San Francisco, she survives him, along with a daughter, Maria Elizabeth Villalba of Manhattan; three step-daughters, Marisol Bocly of Rougemont, Switzerland, Jacqueline Younes of Cairo and Diane de la Bégassière of Palm Beach, Fla.; five grandchildren; and five step-grandchildren. The eminent Egyptologist Bernard V. Bothmer, his brother, died in 1993.
Dr. von Bothmer began teaching at the Institute of Fine Arts in Manhattan in 1965. His many works on Greek art include “Amazons in Greek Art” (1957), “Ancient Art From New York Private Collections” (1961) “An Inquiry Into the Forgery of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (1961) and “The Amasis Painter and His World: Vase-Painting in Sixth-Century B.C. Athens” (1985).
Dr. von Bothmer roamed the world in search of ancient vases and works of sculpture, taking detailed photographs as he went, amassing an enormous archive that he kept in file cabinets and, to an astonishing degree, retained as mental images.
“He was one of the few people who could look at a fragment of a vase and realize, by consulting his limitless memory, that it belonged to a vase in the Louvre,” said Jody Maxmin, a professor of art history and classics at Stanford University. “Then he’d buy it and donate it. The world of vases, for him, was an infinite, never-finished jigsaw puzzle.”