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I first met Bernard V. Bothmer in June 1969 and last spoke with him three weeks before his death in November 1993. During the twenty-four years separating those events, I was his student, assistant, traveling companion, colleague, confidante, disciple, detractor, and defender. When Bill Hudson, President of the Egyptological Seminar of New York, invited me to write about BVB, I was initially reluctant to accept. Richard A. Fazzini, Bothmer's successor as Chairman of The Brooklyn Museum's Egyptian Department, had already recounted BVB's professional achievements,¹ and Dietrich Wildung had presented a brief but masterful appraisal of BVB's career and its significance to the study of ancient Egyptian art.² I felt that another econcomium would be superfluous.

Eventually, however, I reconsidered. Bernard V. Bothmer was arguably one of the most influential and conspicuous Egyptologists of the second half of the twentieth century. His professional fame is immortal,³ but his human qualities may be forgotten in a generation. Fazzini's and Wildung's writings and the bibliography accompanying this essay (pp. 15-24) provide a record of his scholarly accomplishments, but they tell little about this complicated and difficult man. The following impressions and recollections are not intended for the present generation which knows exactly how human he could be. Rather, these words are set down for any future Egyptologist or historiographer who might otherwise know BVB only from his body of scholarly and curatorial work.⁴

Mr. Bothmer was a complex man. He could be warm-hearted and charming one moment, arrogant and dictatorial the next. During his forty-seven year career at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, Bothmer's uncompromising standards, brutal honesty, and compulsive attention to details infuriated many colleagues. Yet those very same qualities engendered a devoted circle of admirers. Mr. Bothmer never wanted to give offense, but few have done it with greater ease. Yet if you were willing to accept his faults, you soon discovered a man of uncommon compassion, loyalty, and integrity.

Many qualities shaped Bernard Bothmer and reactions people had to him. Most elemental, of course, were his physicality and temperament. BVB was a commanding, at times imposing presence. He stood 6'2" high, but his erect carriage, huge arms and hands, and shock of dark brown hair combed back in 1930s fashion combined to make him seem even larger. BVB's effortless gallantry and self-confidence gave him an overwhelmingly magnetic attraction. He moved with grace, and men and women--particularly women--noticed him. Bothmer's charisma derived, in part, from his ability to seize control of any situation. Whether leaping from his Land Rover to direct traffic at some impossibly congested Cairo intersection or shutting down the Museum's elevator for ten minutes to search its grimy floor on his hands and knees for a colleague's missing contact lens, Bothmer combined decisive action with grand theater.

One example of this combination has become legendary in The Brooklyn Museum. In the early 1970s a Hollywood movie crew shot several scenes for the comedy "The Hot Rock" in Brooklyn's Egyptian galleries. The excitement running through the Department failed to affect Mr. Bothmer who bristled at the disruption in his work schedule. Reportedly, late one afternoon, he returned to his office to find a stranger seated at his desk. Never liking surprises, BVB immediately challenged the man. "Who are you, and what are you doing in my office?" demanded Bothmer. With an assurance born of celebrity, the trespasser answered, "I am Robert Redford, and I am using the telephone." In his most commanding voice, BVB responded, "I don't care if you're Donald Redford, I must ask you to leave." Sensing he was vanquished, the actor made one of the most ignominious exits of his career.

Command was in Mr. Bothmer's blood. His great great grandfather was Baron Friedrich Adolph von Riedesel Major-General of the Brunswick contingent of Hessian troops during the American Revolutionary War. The Baron's wife and three daughters, ages six, three, and one, accompanied him on his American campaign. When Riedesel was captured at the battle of Saratoga in 1777, he and his family were sent first to Boston and ultimately to northern Virginia. There the Baron met, and frequently went riding with Thomas Jefferson, his neighbor and one of BVB's few beau ideals. When BVB was a child, his grandmother often entertained him with stories about the Baron's heroism in the face of the "American barbarians." One of the first things Bothmer did when he arrived in Boston in 1946 was to find that city's Riedesel Street. He told me, "It was disappointingly small."

Some of Mr. Bothmer's most memorable personality traits may have been inherited not from Friedrich, but from his wife Baroness Frederika von Riedesel (known to her husband's soldiers as "Madame General"). By all contemporary accounts a lovely, petite, and vivacious woman, the countess was, like her great great grandson, never afraid to speak her mind. When introduced to the Marquis de Lafayette, for example, she chided him for being disloyal to his class. Throughout her stay in North America, Baroness Riedesel maintained a spirited journal filled with her unflattering reactions to the country and its "common" residents. There the Baroness complained about the weather in Massachusetts, wood ticks, and the lax morals of Virginia's youth,⁵ just as 200 years later Mr. Bothmer would carp endlessly about overly airconditioned rooms, the roaches in his Cairo apartment, and a lack of civility on the New York City subway.

No part of Mr. Bothmer's multifaceted personality was more conspicuous than his need to establish and maintain order. Throughout his life he suffered from a single recurring nightmare: waking up in a forest "with the hand of Man nowhere to be seen." For Bothmer a darkened woods devoid of buildings, bridges, or roads lacked empirical order; it was wild and uncontrollable, and thus the most fearful archetype in his personal universe.

Mr. Bothmer's obsessive quest for order had its profoundest expression in his professional accomplishments. The Corpus of Late Egyptian Sculpture, with its hundreds of neatly arranged folders of photographs, scores of notebooks, and dovetailing systems for retrieving information, represents his greatest attempt at controlling vast bodies of data. In a larger sense his life was committed to the day-to-day domestication of Egyptian art. He was driven to record every ancient statue and relief. A work of art that had not been subjected to his exhaustive system of documentation existed "in the wild." To be truly meaningful it needed the discipline his methodology imposed.

Order and methodology require systems to empower them, and BVB was a master at devising tactics for achieving his ends. He formulated his own procedures for performing almost every task, from designing stunning gallery installations to peeling oranges purchased from a peasant along the Saqqara road. And he broached no deviation. A student or assistant foolhardy enough to venture a different approach was instantaneously reproached. Mr. Bothmer never raised his voice; rather, he would tighten his jaw, purse his lips, and look downward. The message was clear: he was profoundly saddened and disappointed by your failure to meet his high expectations for you. To his credit, however, BVB never held a grudge. Once you acknowledged your transgression, you were welcomed back into his good graces.

To endure such treatment, it was helpful to understand that Mr. Bothmer's methods were not capricious; they were always based on practical considerations. New secretaries in Brooklyn's Egyptian Department, for example, rapidly learned that when stapling two pieces of paper together, the staple had to be affixed on the bias rather than horizontally or vertically. This technique, he explained, enabled him to flip the pages without tearing them. Such orientation sessions were unsettling to new employees, but, of course, his method for stapling was more efficient.

No one truly understood BVB's obsession for procedure until they assisted him in the carefully orchestrated ritual of photographing Egyptian sculpture.⁶ Every piece of photographic equipment had to be laid out on a work table, like a surgeon's instruments, in precisely the same arrangement each time he worked. His assistants were expected to memorize that prescriptive plan and duplicate it without variation. Once he had decided on the proper distance between his camera and the statue, he would stare through the view finder and utter simple commands--"bellows extension", "35mm. lens", "cable release", etc.--and the desired items were expected to appear instantaneously in his hand. As with his stapling technique, BVB's demanding methods were expedient, not arbitrary. When he photographed, especially in galleries open to the public, speed was essential. Photography attracts the curious, and he was always concerned for the safety of objects he was photographing. Bothmer also knew that nervous curators--particularly in the Cairo Museum--might demand that he stop at any moment. Once they started fidgeting, he worked even faster.

Mr. Bothmer followed a rigid system of protocol. For most of his tenure at The Brooklyn Museum, he also held the position of Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts; but he considered himself to be principally a curator, not a teacher. To emphasize this distinction, he insisted that his students address him as "Mr." and not "Professor" Bothmer. Only when you completed your dissertation were you allowed to call him Bernard. After he retired from the Museum in 1982 and assumed the Lila Acheson Wallace Professorship in Ancient Egyptian Art at the Institute, he was invariably called "Professor." A few days after he had taught his last class at the Institute, one of his new students visited him in the hospital. When he called him "Professor Bothmer," he corrected him. "My career as your teacher is over. From now on, you must address me simply as 'Mr. Bothmer.'"

People frequently marveled at Mr. Bothmer's seemingly preternatural memory, but his natural powers of recall were hardly superhuman.⁷ To bolster his memory BVB developed innumerable aide-mémoire, all based on the written word. Most notorious of these were his Zettel (German for "scraps of paper"). If he wanted to remember something, he jotted down a note to himself on a Zettel and taped it to his office lamp or to the shaving mirror in his appartment. This seemingly benign system only became irksome when he imposed it on others. If BVB wanted an assistant or student to carry out a task for him, he would pass on his request in the form of a Zettel. Crucial to the efficacy of Zettel-system was the annoyance it engendered, for by BVB's rules, these nasty intrusive slips of paper could only be discarded when the work they demanded was completed. It did not help to ignore them or let them pile up, for, as I soon learned, he would make a photocopy of each Zettel and tape it in his desk calendar so that a duplicate would reappear exactly two months after he gave you the original. Another effective mnemonic was Mr. Bothmer's "city-envelope system." In his office he kept a series of over fifty manila envelopes, one for each major city he might someday visit. When he learned about an unrecorded block statue in Pittsburgh or a fine French restaurant in Prague, for example, he wrote the information on a Zettel and filed it in the appropriate envelope. The day he left for the city, he packed the envelope in his carry-on and planned his itinerary in flight.

Inconsistency frustrated him, particularly the disorder caused by an absence of uniform terminology in Egyptological writing. He was bedeviled by the alabaster-calcite-travertine controversy,⁸ and fretted over scholars' apparent inability to decide whether to designate the Egyptians' principal building material as "mudbrick", "mud brick", or "mud-brick." During his years at Brooklyn he spent every Wednesday morning editing manuscripts for exhibition catalogs and departmental publications including the Wilbour Monographs and Miscellania Wilbouriana. Here, at least, he could establish a proper sense of order, even if it was uniquely his own. Not a single book, article, or label produced during his Brooklyn years ever contained the expression "provenance unknown." BVB believed that "provenance unknown" implied that an object's original find spot was incapable of being known. Instead, he always used "provenance not known." No editor I've consulted can appreciate this distinction, but to Mr. Bothmer, it was meaningful and essential. When a colleague pointed out that the dictionary definition of "unknown" is "not known," he replied, "That's their problem."

Woe betide the unfortunate graduate student or museum administrator who violated the rules of standard English. Inevitably they would be reduced to submissive awe by his corroding sarcasm. I'll cite one most memorable example. Some twenty years ago Brooklyn's Education Department was headed by an earnest young man whom we will call, for the sake of privacy, Donald Katzoff. He was an able administrator but notoriously cavalier about grammar and spelling. One afternoon, after reading a partcularly egregious memorandum from Mr. Katzoff, BVB turned to me playfully and said "Watch this!" He telephoned Mr. Katzoff's office and invited him up for the Department's ritual of 4:00 tea and ginger snaps. Mr. Katzoff seemed genuinely grateful for the honor, unaware that he was already in Mr. Bothmer's cross hairs. The "kill" would be sudden and unexpected. "Katzoff, Katzoff, a most interesting name. Is that Katzoff with a 'K' or a 'C'?" "With a 'K'," he replied. Mr. Bothmer focused his penetrating blue-grey eyes directly at Mr. Katzoff and asked "Are you certain?"

Such behavior made Mr. Bothmer many enemies, but he rarely returned their animosity. He reserved his abhorrence exclusively for the unspeakable demons of his youth. BVB left Germany in 1938, repulsed by the brutality of National Socialism and before the end of World War II entered the U.S. Army--"I enlisted; I was not drafted." Mr. Bothmer knew which Egyptologists had sympathized with or joined the Nazi Party, and he never forgave them. Once in the late 1970s, while visiting Chicago House in Luxor, he was told that a distinguished German Egyptologist was in the library. Aware that the man had been an SS-officer, Bothmer knew that he could not stay. But he was also aware that as a guest, he owed certain courtesies to his hosts who were ignorant of the German scholar's despicable past. Rather than make a scene, Mr. Bothmer conveniently remembered another engagement, bowed politely, and quietly left the Chicago House grounds.

This signal anecdote encapsulates another defining aspect of BVB's nature. His unflagging sense of moral and social rectitude was that of a European aristocrat, curiously out of time and place in twentieth century America. Feminists were frequently put off by his gallantry, but he continued to hold doors for women, to rise from his chair when they entered the room, and to call each of them "my dear." Once his female detractors realized that BVB's behavior was sincere and not affected, few seemed to mind. His encyclopedic knowledge of food, wine, art, and literature made him appear, to some, a know-it-all; the frustrating thing was that he frequently did know it all. Mr. Bothmer's talents as raconteur were legendary, and he was a favorite guest of the wealthy and powerful who appreciated his sparkling wit and genial grace; and he basked in their attention.

His European origins notwithstanding, Mr. Bothmer considered himself a true "American success story." He shamelessly extolled the virtues of his adopted country, and like other European émigrés, such as the Genevan diplomat and financier Albert Gallatin,⁹ he saw the United States as a place where prosperity depended on ambition and energy, not on class. BVB once told me that he had no idea of what American was about--most of his preconceptions had been formed by his grandmother--until he joined the U.S. Army. Two army buddies, a truck driver from Tennessee and a farmer from Mississippi, taught him his new country's egalitarian principles while schooling him in the art of swearing "like an American." He never forgot their lessons. To the end of his days the worst thing BVB could say about someone was "He's a damn snob."

During the last decade of his life, his whole nature seemed transformed; Bothmer's old truculence frequently gave way to an infectious good humor. BVB rededicated himself to his students, and for the first time in his life, he permitted them access to his humanity. He not only taught them and helped them professionally, he also sought to be their friend. Both he and they flourished in this new intimacy. After he died, one of his last students told me that she would treasure their friendship forever. Note that she spoke of their "friendship," and not of their relationship as professor and pupil. In the twilight of his career, BVB was not afraid to reinvent himself. He sought peace and comfort in old age and discovered it, in part, in the affection of his students. Knowledge of this final achievement allowed him to die as he had lived: confident, secure, and successful.

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Notes:

¹"Bernard V. Bothmer (1912-1993)," JARCE 32 (1995) 1-3.

²"Bothmer Quality: Zum Tod der Ägyptologen Bernard V. Bothmer," Antike Welt 25, 1 (1994) 94.

³See also, W.R. Dawson and E.P. Uphill (eds.), Who Was Who in Egyptology (3rd edition, revised by M.L. Bierbrier). (London 1995) 56-57.

⁴For a frank discussion of Mr. Bothmer's career and personality, see the obituary written by T.G.H. James in the London Times edition of 3 December 1993.

⁵For the Riedesels, see L.H. Tharp, The Baroness and the General (Boston and Toronto, 1962), passim, and E.J. Lowell, The Hessians and the Other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War (Williamstown, Mass., 1975) 117-125, 136-148, 152-196. For the Baroness's journal see M.L. Brown, Jr., ed., Baroness von Riedesel and the American Revolution: Journal and Correspondence of a Tour of Duty, 1776-1783 (Chapel Hill, 1964).

⁶Mr. Bothmer published his "rules" for photographing Egyptian art in "Musings of an ARCE Fellow at Work in Cairo," NARCE 74 (July, 1970) 11-19. He learned most of these techniques from his old friend and mentor, H.W. Müller; see B.V. Bothmer, "On Photographing Egyptian Art," SAK 6 (1978) 51-53, pls. V-XVI.

⁷Thus, my all-time favorite BVB quote: "I love What's-Her-Name like a daughter!"

⁸L. Gorelick, et al., "The Broken and Repaired Statuette of Pepy I: an Ancient or Modern Repair?," BES 11 (1991/92) 33, n. 2.

⁹Not the collector of Egyptian art but his ancestor, Jefferson's Treasury Secretary; R. Walters, Jr., Albert Gallatin; Jeffersonian Financier and Diplomat (Pittsburgh, 1957) passim.

Bernard V. Bothmer Homepage

©2005 Edward K. Werner; text ©1996 James F. Romano
Last updated: February 1, 2005