Dietrich von Bothmer was a brilliant Classical art historian and museum curator who possessed an astonishing memory. This, harnessed to careful scholarship, produced formidable results. His chosen field of expertise was Greek pottery, in particular the attribution of individual Athenian vases to the hands of the craftsmen who decorated them. This field had been developed by the Oxford scholar J. D. Beazley, and Bothmer’s brief period of study with him in 1938-39 was to determine his intellectual future. He went on to write many important works on Greek pottery and his years as a museum curator resulted in two excellent, ground-breaking international exhibitions that centred on the finest products of Athenian pottery at its acme (c.550-470BC).

Bothmer took particular pleasure in making joins between fragments of Athenian pottery that had somehow become dispersed among collections around the globe. He was a master at this game of jigsaw puzzles, and his determination and generosity in then trying to reunite such separated orphans were exemplary.

His whole professional career was devoted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He served on the staff of the Department of Greek and Roman Art for more than 60 years, joining in April 1946 as an assistant curator and in due course becoming chairman in 1973. In 1990 he relinquished the headship of the department and became distinguished research curator.

As chairman, he was responsible for several highly popular exhibitions on Greek art, the first attempted by the Metropolitan Museum — on treasures from Thrace (1977), on Greek Art from the Aegean Islands (1979-80), and on Alexander the Great (1982-83). Closer to his heart were the two very important exhibitions on Athenian vase-painters that he initiated and was the driving force behind. The first was dedicated to the Amasis Painter, an anonymous black-figure vase-painter named after the potter Amasis, for whom he regularly worked. It was shown across America, in New York, Toledo and Los Angeles, between 1985 and 1986. The second, on Euphronios, the great Athenian red-figure vase-painter and potter, was exhibited between 1990 and 1991 in Arezzo in Italy, in Paris and in Berlin.

His academic output over 60 years was enormous. There are major books and catalogues (both of museums and excavations) and a large number of substantial articles on Greek vase-painters and their products. His Greek Vase Painting: An Introduction (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1972) has proved particularly popular and been reprinted many times.

Bothmer’s selfless scholarship was well known. Professor Beazley, in the preface to his most important work on Athenian red-figured vases in 1963, said: “For many years, with the utmost generosity, he has continued to place his notes and photographs at my disposal. Without them many vases would have been less well known to me, and many others would not have been known to me at all: many vases, and indeed whole collections. By his patient scrutiny and his acute criticisms he has substantially improved the book.”

In later years Bothmer similarly opened his archive to young visiting scholars and students, ever ready to discuss with them their projects and the minutiae of vase-painting. In 1965 he was appointed Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and proved a master of the graduate seminar, developing a band of highly successful students. His method required of them what he required of himself: the patience to look and the imagination to see. It is no surprise to find him quote, when discussing his method, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince: “On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur” — “One only truly sees with the heart”.

It was in much the same vein as his letters to Beazley and his teaching of his students that he approached the reviewing in print of the publications of others. He felt it his duty to reveal the truth, if he knew it, to amplify and to improve for the sake of scholarship. Such reviews were always thorough, indeed exhaustive, but were only really feared by those who were unwilling to learn.

From early in his career he became interested in American private collections of Greek art, and their collectors. He encouraged their interest and brought many of them into the orbit of the Metropolitan Museum, to the great benefit of that institution. Furthermore, he and his wife, Joyce, themselves made considerable donations to the museum, funding the acquisition of objects and contributing to the redevelopment of the Classical Department’s galleries, generosity that the museum honoured in 1999 by naming the two principal galleries of Classical art and pottery the “Bothmer Galleries”. Their giving, however, had an international dimension, as they also gave very generously to Oxford (Wadham College and the Ashmolean Museum) and to the Louvre.

In a long career Bothmer was responsible for many important acquisitions. But it is a small number of highly controversial examples that for some critics cast a shadow over his time at the Metropolitan Museum. His training in New York had been to acquire, and the society surrounding the relatively young museum that the Metropolitan was, whether at trustee level or among wealthy supporters of the museum, demanded that such acquisitions be spectacular, perhaps naively caring less about the means than the result. In the mid-1960s, for example, Bothmer was instrumental in acquiring a series of gold jewellery and silver vessels that turned out to have been looted from Lydian tombs near Usak in Turkey. Although such robbing can never be condoned, Bothmer’s determined quest to acquire as much of the spoil as he possibly could did mean that almost all of it stayed together. In 1993 this Lydian material was returned to Turkey and placed in a new local museum, where it has sadly been seen only by the few, and one item at least seems to have been stolen.

Dietrich Felix von Bothmer was born in Eisenach in Thuringia, Germany, in 1918. He studied first in Berlin and then, in 1938, won a scholarship from the Cecil Rhodes Foundation, which enabled him to go to Oxford and undertake a diploma in Classical study with Professor Beazley. In 1939 Bothmer left Oxford to travel in America, but when the Second World War broke out he refused to return to Germany with its detested Nazi regime and was supported in his doctoral studies on Greek pottery in America through scholarships and fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, and then the University of Chicago. In the summer of 1943 he enlisted in the US Army, becoming a naturalised American citizen. On service in the South Pacific, he was wounded in action and decorated for saving the life of a fellow soldier.

He is survived by his wife, Joyce, two children, Bernard and Maria, and five grandchildren.

Dr Dietrich von Bothmer, expert on Greek pottery, was born on October 26, 1918. He died October 12, 2009, aged 90