翁同龢后人给波士顿艺术博物馆送了份大礼

As a child in China, Wan-go H.C. Weng, born to a family of art collectors that stretched five generations before him, remembers standing on tiptoes to see the fine paintings and calligraphic scrolls splayed on the family table as his father and his friends surveyed them with a critical eye. His father, playfully, would dismiss the boy’s curiosity, he recalled recently. “What do you know?” he would chide. Weng, undaunted, would respond: “I don’t know anything, but I like to look.”

翁万戈出生中国一个艺术收藏家庭，翁家收藏艺术品已经历了五代。他还记得小时候，踮起脚尖看父亲和朋友们用挑剔的眼光审视摆在家里桌子上的精美书画卷轴。他最近回忆，当时父亲开玩笑似的没有把这个孩子的好奇心当回事。“你知道什么?”父亲轻叱道。胆大的瓮万戈会说:“我什么都不知道，但我喜欢看。”

More than 90 years later, a passion seeded in boyhood has culminated in the largest gift of Chinese art ever received by the Museum of Fine Arts. Weng has donated his family’s collection of 183 works of art — spanning 13 centuries and five dynasties of Chinese Imperial rule, built over six generations — to the museum. “He made a significant decision,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, the museum’s director. “This is a collection that’s been handed down through the family from one generation to another. This is a legacy gift, and I wouldn’t underestimate that word for him.”

90多年后，少年时代播下的热情种子在波士顿美术馆收到最大的中国艺术品捐赠的时刻达到了顶峰。瓮万戈把家族收藏的183件艺术品全部捐给了波士顿美术馆，这些艺术品跨越了13个世纪、历经五代中国王朝，凝结了6代人的心血。“他做出了一个重大决定，”波士顿美术馆馆长马修·泰特尔鲍姆说，“这些都是家族代代相传的收藏。是遗产的馈赠，我们不能低估馈赠这个词对他的意义。

The gift helps make the MFA’s collection of Chinese paintings one of the most important outside China, the museum says.
Weng, himself a renowned scholar of Chinese art, is particularly intimate with the MFA’s collection of Chinese art. Last summer, the museum showed his family’s “10,000 Miles Along the Yangzi River,” a 53-foot long 1699 scroll painting by the artist Wang Hui, in honor of his 100th birthday. It was an outward display acknowledging a deep relationship nearly 70 years in the making. On the occasion, Weng donated the piece to the museum — one of more than 20 gifts that he gave over the years.

波士顿艺术博物馆表示，有了这些礼物，博物馆将成为境外典藏中国艺术品最大的博物馆之一。
瓮万戈本身就是一位著名的中国艺术学者，他尤其关心波士顿艺术博物馆的中国艺术收藏。去年夏天，为了庆祝他的100岁生日，博物馆特意展出了他家人收藏的《长江万里图》，该画全长53英尺(约合16.15米)，是画家王翚1699年创作的。这次对外展出，显示了翁家与波士顿艺术博物馆近70年来的深厚关系。现在瓮万戈把这件作品捐给了博物馆，多年来，他已经向博物馆捐赠了20多件珍贵藏品。

Weng, who moved to New Hampshire in 1978, first connected to the museum through his own research in the 1940s, and he has been in close contact with a succession of curators and directors ever since. It afforded him a long view of the museum’s strengths and weaknesses, and how his collection might augment it.

瓮万戈1978年搬到新罕布什尔，20世纪40年代经由自己调查首次联系到了博物馆。从那以后，他一直与博物馆馆长和中国藏品主管人员保持着密切联系。因此他对博物馆的优点和缺点都比较了解，对他的藏品将如何增加博物馆的价值也很清楚。

“That was something Wan-go was very aware of for many years,” said Nancy Berliner, the museum’s curator of Chinese art. “Our collection is very strong in early Chinese paintings, from about 950 [A.D.] to 1350. But we don’t have as many masterpieces from the later periods, the Ming and Qing dynasties. His intention was to fill that gap.”
Teitelbaum concurred. “Where we’re weak, [Weng’s collection] augments,” he said. “As an institution that wants to have a comprehensive collection of Chinese art, this collection fits like a hand in a glove in our narrative.”

“很多年前瓮万戈就意识到这个问题了，”博物馆的中国艺术策展人南希·柏林纳说。“公元950年到公元1350年的中国化，波士顿艺术博物馆的藏品非常丰富。但是对明清时代杰出的艺术品收藏稍显不足，瓮万戈的就想帮助博物馆填补这一空白。”
特德尔鲍姆馆长也这么认为：“瓮万戈的收藏能帮助博物馆弥补不足，”他说，“作为一个想全面收藏中国艺术品的机构，在我们看来，瓮万戈的收藏简直就是恰到好处。”

Among the many significant elements of Weng’s gift, Berliner said, are major masterpieces from the era’s most important artists: “The Suzhou Sceneries,” an album by Shen Zhou, the founder of the Wu School, made in the late 15th and early 16th centuries; landscape and calligraphic master Wen Zhengming’s “Nine Letters to Home,” from the 16th century; and works by Chen Hongshou, a Ming dynasty master about whom Weng himself has written a definitive book.

柏林纳说，翁万戈的这笔捐赠中有很多非常重要的藏品，大多出自那个时代最重要的艺术大师，比如吴派创始人沈周作于15世纪末到16世纪初的《苏台纪胜十六页书画册》；风景和书法大师文徵明作于16世纪的《九日闲居图》；还有明代大师陈洪绶的作品，翁万戈还曾经写过一部关于他的著作。

Weng came to the United States in 1938 to study engineering at Purdue University, but quickly grew bored with the field and found himself working as a comic book artist in New York before eventually taking up documentary filmmaking. After a short stint in Hollywood, Weng returned to New York to make films about Chinese art and culture. In 1948, the year before the Communist revolution in China, Weng brought his family collection to the United States.

1938年，翁万戈来到美国普度大学学习工程专业，但很快就对这个领域感到厌倦，于是就在纽约从事漫画艺术家的工作，后来又从事纪录片制作。在好莱坞短暂停留后，瓮万戈回到了纽约，拍摄一些中国艺术和文化方面的电影。1948年，中国共产主义革命前，瓮万戈带着自己家族的收藏来到了美国。

His pursuits naturally led him to the MFA, where one of the country’s best collections of early Chinese art resided. And while Weng has given select pieces to other museums over the years, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Shanghai Museum, the MFA has always held a special place, he says.

他的艺术追求自然驱使他找到了波士顿美术馆，这里里是中国早期艺术最好的收藏场馆之一。他说，虽然自己多年来一直把一些精选的艺术品赠给其他博物馆，包括哈佛美术馆、纽约大都会艺术博物馆和上海博物馆，但波士顿美术馆在他心里一直占据着特殊的位置。

“The first museum I ever visited in the US was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and it became my museum,” he said in a statement. The relationship, long-standing, has become “particularly warm and meaningful for Wan-go over the last number of years,” Teitelbaum said. “We never asked for his collection. We let him know we were prepared to be the custodians of his collection, and I feel that very heavily: the sense that the institution will honor the spirit of the collector.”

“我在美国参观的第一个博物馆就是波士顿美术博物馆，看到这座博物馆的第一眼，我就认定了，这就是我要找的博物馆，”他在一份声明中说。泰特尔鲍姆馆长说，博物馆和翁老先生的关系已经很久了，博物馆让“翁万戈在过去很多年都感受到了温暖而有意义”。“我们从来没有主动要过他的藏品。但我们会让他知道博物馆时刻准备成为他藏品的保管者。要让翁老先生深深地感到:博物馆会尊重收藏者的精神。

Weng’s donation marks the second major gift for the MFA in just over a year. Last October, the MFA announced that it would receive 113 works of Dutch and Flemish golden age works from collectors Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo and Susan and Matthew Weatherbie.

瓮万戈捐赠的这批收藏品是波士顿美术博物馆一年来收到的第二重要的礼物。去年10月，波士顿艺术博物馆宣布将从收藏家罗斯-玛丽、艾克·范·奥特卢、苏珊和马修·韦瑟比那里收到113件荷兰和佛兰德黄金时代的作品。

评论部分
-dottie
Wow, the Peabody Essex must be pissed.

哈哈，皮博迪埃塞克斯博物馆一定气坏了。

bnixon
Probably not....looks like he had no particular connections to the PEM. This will only enhance the MFA's already fantastic Chinese art collection. With collections like the PEM's and the MFA's, the Boston area is second to none in the US for Asian art.

应该不会，瓮万戈跟皮博迪埃塞克斯博物馆没有什么特别的联系。这些捐赠会对波士顿艺术博物馆非常丰富的中国艺术品收藏锦上添花。拥有皮博迪埃塞克斯博物馆和波士顿艺术博物馆这样的收藏，波士顿地区在亚洲艺术方面是美国首屈一指的。

yogasong44
Looking great and so active at 100! I wonder if he ever had any children.

简直太棒了，100岁了还这么精神!我想知道他是否有过孩子。

swfoutsida
Interested?

感兴趣吗?

galileo
Hope the MFA will exhibit more of their fabulous Asian collection. They’ve been pretty stingy with it lately.

希望波士顿艺术博物馆能展示更多亚洲艺术品收藏。博物馆最近相当吝啬。

menotomygirl
Agree. They have treasures of Asian art in their archives, too few of which is displayed. I know some such works are fragile and can only be shown with the right lighting, and not too much or too long. But when you see enormous galleries filled with shallow contemporary pieces, it's sad to think of what could be seen.

同意。波士顿艺术博物馆保存着许多亚洲艺术珍品，但很少展出。我知道有些艺术品比较脆弱，对灯光照射时间有规定，光线不能太强，也不能太久。但当你看到宽敞庞大的画廊里摆满了肤浅的当代作品时，想到还有好多可以看的艺术品，就会很伤感。

garymichael
i don't know the politics of all this but what a generous gift. more people in America will get to see this style of art.

我不知道这次捐献有什么政治意义，但无论如何这是一份多么慷慨的礼物啊。更多的美国人将会看到这种风格的艺术。

Boston_Born_Bred
Bravo to the gift of generosity!

为慷慨的礼物喝彩!

swfoutsida
I read this as 'MBTA receives giant gift of Chinese art.' Mind went so far to imagine that these would somehow be displayed!!! :)
What an absolutely AMAZING donation -
'Weng has donated his family’s collection of 183 works of art — spanning 13 centuries and five dynasties of Chinese Imperial rule, built over six generations '

我读这篇文章的时候，我还以为是美国马萨诸塞州交通局收到了中国艺术品的巨大礼物。满脑子都是这种东西会以某种方式展示出来!!!”:)
多么惊人的捐赠-
“瓮万戈把家族收藏的183件艺术品全部捐给了波士顿美术馆，这些艺术品跨越了13个世纪、历经五代中国王朝，凝结了6代人的心血”。

BornSerious
This is great. Next, it would be wonderful if someone donated lots of money so the MFA could use it to build more museum space and get many of its archives out into the public eye.

太伟大了。接下来如果再有人捐很多钱，让波士顿艺术博物馆扩建博物馆，就可以展示更多的收藏品，观众能看到更多的收藏品，这非常棒。

Lynn1066
Sincere thanks to Mr Weng for his generous gift! The people of Boston are pleased and proud to have this collection at the MFA!

衷心感谢翁先生慷慨的礼物!波士顿人们很高兴和自豪波士顿艺术博物馆收藏了您的藏品!

LXL
What a marvelous gift! And unique in so many ways, which is evident in the short video of the amazingly sprite 100-year-old Mr. Weng describing "10,000 Li Along the Yangtze River." Unlike most private collections assembled by a single wealthy individual, this was built by a single family passing on their taste and acumen over multiple generations, befitting the subject of classical Chinese painting. Objects were likely considered and sought after for long periods by family members while they saved up the money to purchase them. And many if not most of these scroll paintings were not displayed on walls of a large house meant to project the owner's wealth, but only taken out and unfurled for the private viewing pleasure of individuals.

多么神奇的礼物啊!在各个方面都是独一无二的，这一点从翁万戈的短片中就可以看出来。100岁高龄的翁老在短片中神采奕奕解说那幅著名的《长江万里图》。与大多数由富豪个人收藏的藏品不同，翁老捐赠的藏品是整个家族收藏的，家族的品位和对艺术的敏锐代代相传，这与中国古典绘画的主题相契合。这些藏品可能是家族成员深思熟虑、苦苦寻找了很久，然后攒钱买下的。而且这些画卷很多都没有为了展示主人的财富而被悬挂在大房子的墙上，而是偶尔被拿出了展示，供个人欣赏。

I agree with several other readers that the question now is how to display this fabulous collection for the museum public. Moving administrative functions as well as the Asian art library (now inconveniently housed in the old Horticultural Hall) to the Forsyth Institute building sounds like a great idea. In any event, a digital program that not only covers all of the works but also the history of the family that collected them should complement any selection of actual objects on display. Nothing like this multigenerational family art collection exists anymore in China itself, so it will attract a new generation of classical art enthusiasts and collectors from China.

我同意一些读者的看法，现在的问题是博物馆如何向公众展示这些精彩的藏品。可以把行政部门和亚洲艺术图书馆(现在坐落在古老的园艺大厅很不方便)搬到福赛斯学院大楼。无论如何，展品的数字介绍不光要涵盖所有的作品的历史，而且还要包括收藏这些作品的家族的历史，展示家族是如何收藏到这些藏品的，这是对藏家这些精品的赞美。这种代代相传的家族艺术品收藏在中国已经绝迹，所以，这样做能吸引中国新一代的古典艺术爱好者和收藏家。