When Gerhard Bott accepted the certificate for twenty-five years of loyal service in the Hessian museums in May 1975, his employer felt compelled to chide the guests - not for the director of the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt, but for his allies in the press.

Minister of Education Hans Krollmann responded to the pointed complaint in the FAZ about the state museum’s low purchase budget, which was just enough for one better Picasso graphic per year, by reading out the list of acquisitions during the fifteen years of Bott’s Darmstadt tenure.

But the names of Corinth, Klee, and Liebermann only showed how clever Bott had managed;

The minister's arithmetic tricks could not shake off the reputation of being a miserly cultural and political gentleman.

Krollmann called the fact that the increase in jobs from 38 to 52 in a decade and a half was rated as insufficient a “deliberate malicious distortion”.

Bott's achievement is measured by the fact that during this period he quadrupled the number of visitors from 60,000 a year.

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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Bott used the mixed-up character of the original landgrave's collections for a new-style universal museum that, incorporating design, architecture and film, invited curators and visitors to explore curious combinatorics.

Showcases from floor to ceiling evoked the memory of shop windows.

Thanks to Bott's nurturing, the shoots of Art Nouveau threw up a second time in Darmstadt.

In Amsterdam he bought the collection of the jeweler KA Citroen;

contemporary jewelry designers had an enthusiastic patron in Bott.

Bott raised money from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for the project to index the art journals from the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, in which a miracle of the present was used: electronic data processing.

The natural history and nature-replicating objects provided attractive views when, in 1968, the opportunity arose to include representative works of Pop Art and a collection of mirabilia by Joseph Beuys in the collection of the Darmstadt manufacturer Karl Ströher, which had been strategically thrown together with the help of art consultants.

Götz Adriani, later director of the Tübingen Kunsthalle, worked as curator at Bott's side.

The director threatens to leave

Although Bott recognized a threat to the autonomy of the museum in Beuys' claim to control every detail of the display of his works, he did everything possible to secure the treasure for Darmstadt in Wiesbaden.

He regularly inquired about the approval of the funds for the extension requested by Ströher - a loyal official asked about it according to Bott's understanding of his official duty.

The owner threatened to withdraw the items on loan.

This pattern was later widely copied, but Bott himself behaved like the collector, bringing his own esteemed person into play as a threat.

The city of Freiburg once reported his poaching.

His silver anniversary then coincided with his departure from Hesse: he became general director of the museums of the city of Cologne and director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum.

Bott's time in Cologne saw the conclusion of the contract with the collector king Peter Ludwig and exhibitions on the late medieval family of sculptors Parler and Bertel Thorvaldsen.

The new museum building south-east of the cathedral, just as monumental as the Parler catalogue, was originally intended to also offer space for the city's collection of older art.

When Bott noticed that the Cologne city administration did not interpret the powers of the director general in the simple German sense of the word, he took over the post with the same title at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in 1980, where he had volunteered in 1950.