Person

Bothmer, Bernard Wilhelm V(on)

1912-1993

American Egyptologist and art historian; he was born in Charlottenburg, Berlin, 13 Oct. 1912, son of Wilhelm Friederich Franz Karl von B., of a Hanoverian noble family, and Marie Julie Auguste Karoline Baroness von and zu Egloffstein; he studied Egyptology at the University of Berlin under Sethe but was unable to finish his dissertation on Egyptian art due to his professor's death; he was appointed as an assistant to Schafer in the Egyptian Department, Berlin Museum, 1932-8 when his post lapsed; because of his opposition to the Nazi government, he fled to France in 1938 and to Switzerland in 1939 where he found temporary employment; he emigrated to the United States in Oct. 1941 where he worked for the Office of War Information and the War Department and later was in army intelligence in Europe until 1946; he was appointed assistant curator in the Department of Ancient Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1 Aug. 1946-54; Director of the American Research Center in Egypt, 1954-6; Fulbright resident fellow in Cairo, 1954-6, 1963-4; he became associate curator in the Dept. of Ancient Art, The Brooklyn Museum, 1956-63; curator in succession to Cooney, 1963-82; he lectured at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1960-78; professor, 1979; Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art, 1982-93; Bothmer was a leading specialist in ancient Egyptian sculpture particularly of the Late Period and formed as a research tool the Corpus of Late Egyptian Sculpture, a photographic and bibliographic resource, now in The Brooklyn Museum; he was project director for the New York University's Mendes expedition and the also the Apis House project at Memphis, 1981-6; he organized an exhibition of sculpture of the Late Period Art in The Brooklyn Museum, 1960-1 and produced with E. Riefstahl the authoritative catalogue Egyptian Sculpture of the Late Period, 1960; he was also responsible for two other important exhibitions with significant catalogues Akhenaten and Nefertiti, 1971 and Africa in Antiquity, 1978 which was instrumental in encouraging the study of Nubian and Meroitic Art; a Festschrift in his honour Artibus Aegypti, edited by H. De Meulenaere and L. Limme, was published in 1983; he wrote a large number of articles on Egyptian art and sculpture notably a series Membra Dispersa on fragments of sculpture in different locations; he wrote Brief Guide to the Department of Ancient Art, The Brookes Museum, with J. Keith, 1970 and edited the Catalogue of the Luxor Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art, 1979, and posthumously a travel diary Egypt 1950: My First Visit, ed. Emma Swan Hall, 2003; and Egyptian Art: selected writings of B. V. Bothmer, 2004, ed. by M. E. Cody; his catalogue of Late Period sculpture in the Cairo Museum remained unfinished at his death; his archives were acquired by the Egyptological Archives of the University degli Studi di Milano in 2008; he died in New York, 24 Nov. 1993.

• Who Was Who in Egyptology (4th ed. 2012), 72-3 fig (portrait).