Dietrich von Bothmer: A Reminiscence

October 17, 2009

After attending Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer’s funeral service in New York on October 16, 2009, I felt satisfied that the proper encomia from family, friends, and colleagues had been delivered for the assembled.  But, like many of Dietrich’s former ‘pupils’, as he was wont to refer to his graduate students, I find myself needing to record some of my own memories on behalf of those not present, or those who were but longed for more.

Because this was a man larger than life, but paradoxically vulnerable, a man who was consumed by a need for victory on the battlefield of intellectual engagement but who loved his family unreservedly, and a man who raged against mediocrity while selectively betraying tenderness.

My memories of this man, who gave me my first job and launched my career, are colored by the loss in 2003 of my father Quentin Anderson, another figure who was widely revered and widely misunderstood, who also died at 90, and whose legacy as an author and mentor is also complicated. As the Julian Clarence Levy Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, he was once referred to in a student-produced course guide as “the most friendly, pompous man on the Columbia campus.”  The cohabitation of those adjectives has puzzled his family and close friends for a generation, but that paradoxical identity rings true for both men, even though neither was truly pompous, since neither was “exaggeratedly or ostentatiously dignified or self-important.”  They were both dignified and important, and made no pretense about it, but were theatrical in their demeanor.  For my dad, that came naturally enough, being the son of the playwright Maxwell Anderson, and even playing the most minor of roles as a self-proclaimed "spear-carrier" in his father's plays on Broadway. For Dietrich, the process of reinvention as an American after fleeing Hitler’s Germany demanded the creation of a new worldview, and, most comfortably, the persona of a man who was no one’s victim.

My life was shaped by both men, in different ways, and that explains why it feels purgative to record some memories and thoughts the day after Dietrich’s funeral.  Because the loss of my father came days before I privately consented to resign from the directorship of the Whitney Museum of American Art—and therefore during a turbulent time in my life.  In a way, this brief reminiscence is in part a tribute to another great intellectual in my life, the one who brought me into the world, as well as to the one who gave me a platform for my professional life.

Dietrich, as I was invited to address him upon the completion of my doctorate in 1981, was to most people an unrelenting, exacting, and wickedly sharp-tongued scholar.  Since he gave me an office down the hall from him in 1977, as a recent Dartmouth graduate, an office I had for a decade hence, I came to know him as that person and also as a man given to quiet introspection, informality, great generosity, and endearing befuddlement at multiple features of the modern world.

Were I to try to chronicle all the anecdotes over the decade of studying and working alongside him, I would fill a book. Just a few tales will serve to give some texture. Others are doubtless at their keyboards today with the same purpose as mine, and I make no claim to being the best raconteur to capture the flavor of Dr. von Bothmer’s life.

But I recognized that, from our first meeting in the summer of 1977, he saw his young followers in two categories: lost causes and striplings with potential. Happily I fit into the second category, though I was later to stray from purely academic concerns and descend into what Dietrich might, with grudging admiration, concede to be a necessary profession: museum director.

I’m conscious of the station of museum directors for him since permanently tacked outside his door was a copy of a handwritten rebuke he had sent to one of his many directors: Thomas P.F. Hoving.  It was a sarcastic and pointed note, and it always seemed to me to be a variant of a mezuzah, those miniature scrolls with verses from the Torah attached to the doorpost of doorways in Jewish homes, or perhaps a variant of Martin Luther’s Theses affixed to the Castle Church in Wittenburg.  Dietrich was thoroughly educated about every religion practiced to this day along with those long forgotten. In this case the document was not religious, but funny and apotropaic at the same time, intended to let Hoving know whereof the Met’s intellectual authority sprang—from the curators--and to remind visitors to his office that Dietrich was no one’s fool.

I was accepted as a summer intern at the Met during my senior year at Dartmouth, and asked to be posted to the Greek and Roman Department.  To judge from the pained reaction of the educator running the internship program, this request was unwelcome because it would require her to call Dr. von Bothmer and risk his dismissive wrath.  But ultimately I had an audience with DvB, as he was also known, and arrived in his office with a mixture of hope and dread.  His first indelible words were “I read your honors thesis. Highly speculative.  I trust you will never do anything like it again.”  Apparently my youthful inquiry into the origins of pictorial space in Attic black-figured vase painting was a misguided effort—but it did serve to get my foot in the door.  He grilled me for what seemed to be an eternity, picking up objects on his work table and asking me to date them, describe their subject, and their author.  Although I was in a daze most of the time, I seem to remember saying “470-460 B.C.?” about the date of a red-figure cup, only to hear him reply “Entirely wrong: 480 B.C.” 

But this spirited inquisition concluded with these words: “Very well. Mrs. Springer will show you your office.  I will see you at 8 o’clock on Monday morning.”  And with that vignette of fierceness and generosity, I became a museum person.

             

Dietrich loved sharing and showing his hard-won knowledge.  A woman once called up from the Met’s information desk asking to show someone a Greek vase she had brought in.  Our serial department secretaries were routinely instructed to “just hang up on them”, but in this instance something persuaded him to allow the hapless caller upstairs. An Upper East Side lady arrived carrying a small, sealed cardboard box.  She set it down on the table in the entrance office of the Greek and Roman Department.  He strode in and asked her what she wanted.  She replied that she was hoping to know about the vase she had brought in.  He lifted the sealed box, and just as quickly put it back on the table.  “It’s a fake,” he said curtly, turned on his heel, and returned to his office.

She looked at me in stupefaction.  I offered to look at the actual object, and she unpacked the box, newspaper and all.  I held up the offending item, which was indeed a reproduction, and explained that it was made for the tourist trade. She naturally asked, “how could he know that without even looking at it?”  I explained that it was too heavy to be authentic—that Greek potters would never use any more clay than necessary, and that he must have noted as much when hefting the box. She was slightly mollified, but after she made her way downstairs the secretary and I had to burst into laughter at his parlor trick.

A similar visit by a fledgling collector of the Museum’s acquaintance took connoisseurship to a different level. She had recently come into possession of a cup by the vase painter Douris, and was soliciting Dietrich’s comments.  She said, in an exploratory way, “I like it, but it’s not very vigorous, is it?”  He retorted dismissively: “Vigorous?  You don’t get vigor from Douris. You get vigor from Makron!”  Implicit in his reaction was of course impatience with her question, but more importantly evidence of his complete fluency in the artistic intention of long-lost artists whose oeuvre he could recite as a mere mortal might what he had for breakfast.  His much-ballyhooed photographic memory of every Greek vase in existence was matched by a powerful empathy and understanding of the artistic character of each vase painter, which was the most rewarding dimension of his brilliance.

Dietrich loved catching errors, and sometimes rubbing it in. When we visited the recently reinstalled Ancient Near Eastern galleries in the early 1980s, he scanned an expensively produced, backlit timeline under glass. “Look!  It says 0 B.C.!” he laughed.  His point was that at midnight on 1 B.C., the next moment was notionally A.D. 1, even if such dates were a later invention. Similarly, after our riggers had wrestled a colossal glass-framed map of the ancient world onto the wall of the entrance gallery to “The Search for Alexander”, a National Gallery-organized survey of archaeological finds from Thessalonike, he marched in to inspect the show. And immediately pointed out that what was meant to be a period map of the ancient world had an already drilled Suez Canal.

Some of the tender moments for me included curiosity about my life at surprising moments.  He was at his most relaxed and conversational when rubbing vase fragments with Acetone, a constant if poisonous olfactory accompaniment to life in the Department, along with glue, pipe smoke, and Camel cigarettes.  He regularly asked me about my family, and it was always as if he was looking for insight into the person in front of him by means of those who had shaped him.  While not given to being intrusive, he presided over ritualistic birthday celebrations for our small department staff, inevitably accompanied by a bottle of Retsina, a humorous collage tailor-made for each celebrant, and riveting stories about his adventures as a serving soldier in the U.S. Army during World War II when in the Pacific Ocean Theater.

While in practice he was averse to new forms of technology, such as the PBX phone system that confounded him, he tolerated my suggestion in 1981 that we purchase the first personal computer in the Met, but insisted on having our staff commission a soundproofed outer housing for our very noisy NEC 3550 printer.  It was a masterwork of oak and Plexiglas on wheels, so that we could roll the computer to and from the front office to mine in the back.  At first deeply skeptical about this inanimate intruder in our lives, he came to rely on it in ways that gave me secret pride.

The flood of memories is unstoppable, but I will draw this tribute to a close with a parting offering to this extraordinary but very human force of nature. For all the students who trembled in his wake, I urge you to remember what he brought to his discipline of Greek vase painting. For all the archaeologists who saw in him an enabler of tomb-robbing, I would note that he did more than anyone on earth to reconstruct the disiecta membra of vases scattered around the globe. For those who saw him as arrogant, I can attest as can others who worked alongside him that he bridled at pretension and enjoyed his persona but wore it very lightly. And for those who simply didn’t know what to make of him, I would ask you to see him in the fullest light—as a brilliant, irascible scholar who did what he thought was right, and whose high standards encouraged two generations of academics and museum professionals to do the very best that they could so as not to disappoint him.  That alone is a gift the effects of which will last some time, not nearly as long as his scholarship, but long enough in the hearts and minds of those fortunate enough to have had a true measure of the man.

 

Maxwell L. Anderson

The Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO

Indianapolis Museum of Art