方闻：大都会博物馆亚洲艺术收藏的塑造者

Wen C. Fong, a renowned scholar who helped the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York build one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Asian art, died on Oct. 3 in Princeton, N.J. He was 88.

帮助纽约大都会艺术博物馆建起世上最庞大的亚洲艺术收藏之一的著名学者方闻，于10月3日在新泽西州普林斯顿去世，享年88岁。

His wife, Constance Tang Fong, said the cause was leukemia.

方闻的妻子方唐志明称死因为白血病。

A leading figure in the history of Chinese art, Professor Fong taught for 40 years at Princeton University, where in the 1950s he established the nation’s first doctoral degree program in Chinese art and archaeology.

作为中国艺术史领军人物，方闻在普林斯顿大学任教40年，并于20世纪50年代在那里建立了美国第一个中国艺术和考古学博士学位项目。

Beginning in the early 1970s he was a driving force behind the Met’s ambitious effort to expand its collection of Asian art, including masterworks from China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and India, and add space in which to display it.

从20世纪70年代初开始，他推动了大都会艺术博物馆扩充亚洲艺术馆藏的庞大计划，其中包括来自中国、日本、韩国、东南亚和印度的杰作，并且增加了它们的展览空间。

He counseled art collectors and philanthropists like Brooke Astor and Arthur M. Sackler, and persuaded the Met’s director at the time, Thomas Hoving, and the president of its board of trustees, the financier C. Douglas Dillon, to acquire a trove of ancient and modern art works from leading American collectors of Asian art, including C. C. Wang and John M. Crawford Jr.

他为布鲁克·阿斯特(Brooke Astor)和亚瑟·M·萨克勒(Arthur M. Sackler)等艺术收藏家和慈善家提供咨询，并说服当时的大都会艺术博物馆馆长托马斯·霍文(Thomas Hoving)和其董事会主席、金融家C·道格拉斯·狄龙(C. Douglas Dillon)从美国著名亚洲艺术收藏家那里购入一系列古代和现代艺术作品，其中包括王己千和顾洛阜(John M. Crawford Jr.)。

Those efforts brought to the Met an enviable collection of Asian art — hanging scrolls, ancient bronzes, silk tapestries, Chinese paintings dating to the 8th century and more.

这些努力为大都会艺术博物馆带来了令人艳羡的亚洲艺术收藏——立轴、古代青铜器、丝织画以及远及公元8世纪的中国画等等。

An immigrant who went to the United States at age 18, on the eve of the Communist takeover in China, Professor Fong earned a Ph.D at Princeton and then gained a reputation for being an empire builder, first at the Princeton University Art Museum and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

方闻是一名移民，在共产党统治中国前夕离开那里来到美国，时年18岁。他在普林斯顿大学获得博士学位，然后先后在普林斯顿大学艺术博物馆和大都会艺术博物馆获得了一名帝国建设者的声誉。

He educated and mentored a generation of Chinese art scholars, many of them now in posts at leading American universities and art museums. He curated some of the biggest exhibitions of Asian art at the Met, including, “Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei” in 1996 and “The Great Bronze Age of China.”

他教育和指导了一代中国艺术学者，其中许多人现在在美国一流大学和艺术博物馆担任职务。他在大都会艺术博物馆策划了一些关于亚洲艺术最大的展览，包括1996年的“中华帝国的辉煌：台北故宫珍品展”和“伟大的中国青铜时代”。

He also wrote, edited or contributed to more than a dozen books about Chinese art, including his seminal work, “Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th-14th Century,” which was jointly published by the Met and Yale University Press.

他还著写、编辑或参与撰写了十几本关于中国艺术的书籍，包括他的开创性作品《超越再现——8世纪至14世纪中国书画》，由大都会艺术博物馆和耶鲁大学出版社联合出版。

Wen Fong was born in 1930 in Shanghai. His father owned a dry goods store. Wen took to art as a boy, even as chaos enveloped his city during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the civil war that brought the Communists to power.

方闻1930年生于上海。他的父亲开有一家干货店。他从少年时代就开始喜欢艺术，尽管在二战日据期间以及最终令共产党上台的内战期间，混乱笼罩着他的城市。

Tutored at home, he was given a classical Chinese education, at one time by the renowned calligrapher and scholar Li Jian. By age 10 he was giving public exhibitions of his calligraphy.

他在家接受中国古典式教育，一度师从著名书法家和学者李健。十岁时，他的书法作品已经得到公开展出。

Resisting his parents’ wish that he study science, he decided to pursue his interest in art by leaving for the United States to study at Princeton. There he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in medieval European art history and a Ph.D in art history, with a focus on ancient China.

为了反抗父母让他学习科学的愿望，他决定通过前往美国普林斯顿读书来追求他对艺术的兴趣。在那里，他获得了中世纪欧洲艺术史的学士及硕士学位，以及专攻古代中国的艺术史博士学位。

His doctoral work became the basis for his first book, “The Lohans and a Bridge to Heaven,” a study of two Chinese scrolls hanging at the Freer Gallery in Washington that he identified as belonging to a famous Sung dynasty set of 100 depicting the Buddhist deities known as Lohans.

他的博士论文为他的第一本书《罗汉与天桥》打下了基础，是对华盛顿弗里尔画廊(Freer Gallery)里悬挂的两幅中国卷轴的研究，他认为它们属于一套包含100幅画的著名宋代罗汉画集，该画集描绘的是被称为罗汉的佛教神明。

At Princeton, Professor Fong educated generations of students in connoisseurship, teaching them how to examine objects closely. To him, that meant not paging through old books and viewing slides or photographs but encountering the actual works of art, getting a feel for their texture, contours and brush strokes, and then contemplating their meaning and power.

在普林斯顿，方闻教育了几代学生如何鉴赏，教会他们如何仔细审视对象。对他而言，这意味着不止于翻阅古书、查看幻灯片或照片，还要面对艺术作品本身，感受它们的肌理、轮廓和笔触，然后思考它们的意义和力量。

“He’d unroll a scroll on a table and just sit there like a Zen master and say: ‘The object is always right. You’ve got to see what it’s trying to tell you,’ ” recalled Maxwell K. Hearn, who studied under Professor Fong at Princeton and is now chairman of the Asian art department at the Met.

“他在桌子上展开一个卷轴，就像禅师一样坐在那里说：‘对象永远是对的。你必须看到它试图告诉你的内容，’”曾在普林斯顿跟随方闻学习，现任大都会艺术博物馆亚洲艺术部主任的何慕文(Maxwell K. Hearn)说。

Professor Fong and a colleague, Frederick W. Mote, set up the nation’s first doctoral program in Chinese art and archaeology at Princeton in 1959.

方闻和同事牟复礼(Frederick W. Mote)于1959年在普林斯顿大学设立了美国第一个中国艺术和考古博士课程。

To deepen his own appreciation of art, Professor Fong was a faculty curator at the Princeton University Art Museum in the 1960s, which he described as a “laboratory” for his study of ancient forms. He organized special exhibitions and helped the museum strengthen its holdings of photography and Asian art. Among its major acquisitions during that time was the John B. Elliott Collection of Chinese Calligraphy, widely considered one of the finest collections of ancient calligraphy outside of Asia.

为了加深自己对艺术的欣赏，方闻于1960年代开始担任普林斯顿大学艺术博物馆的教师策展人，他将其描述为他对古代艺术形式研究的“实验室”。他组织了特别展览，帮助博物馆强化了摄影和亚洲艺术方面的藏品。在那段时间的重大收购中，约翰·B·艾略特(John B. Elliott)的中国书法藏品被广泛认为是亚洲以外最好的古代书法收藏之一。

Then, in 1971, on the eve of President Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China, the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked Professor Fong to help revamp and upgrade its Asian art collection. At the time, the Met’s Asian holdings were narrow and hardly notable, consisting mainly of jade, a few prized ceramics, and Buddhist sculptures and Japanese prints.

1971年，在理查德·M·尼克松(Richard M. Nixon)总统向中国开放前夕，大都会艺术博物馆要求方闻帮助改造和升级其亚洲艺术收藏品。当时，大都会的亚洲馆藏范围狭窄，几乎没什么名声，内容主要包括玉器、一些珍贵的陶瓷、佛像和日本版画。

Over the next 30 years, as a special consultant to the Met, Professor Fong helped build one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art and antiquities in the world.

在接下来的30年里，作为大都会的特别顾问，方闻帮助其建立了世界上最全面的亚洲艺术品和古董收藏之一。

A man of boundless energy, he hired new Asian specialists at the Met, including Mr. Hearn; he tutored the Met’s board on landmark pieces from Chinese history that might be acquired; and he negotiated with collectors on loaning, donating or selling their works to the museum.

他是一个精力充沛的人，为大都会聘请了新的亚洲专家，其中就包括了何慕文;他就可能购入的中国历史上具有里程碑意义的作品向大都会董事会做了介绍;他与收藏家就向博物馆借款、捐赠或出售进行谈判。

Rather than pursue one piece at a time, Professor Fong often sought to acquire large portions or even entire holdings from a collector. At his urging, for instance, in 1973 the Met acquired 25 Chinese paintings dating from the 11th to 14th centuries from Mr. Wang, a New York collector. It also obtained the 421 works in the Harry C. Packard Collection of Japanese Art, which included some of the finest in the United States; the John M. Crawford Jr. Collection of Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy; and 19th- and 20th-century Chinese paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection.

方闻经常试图从收藏家那里获得他们的大部分甚至全部藏品，而不是一次追求一件作品。例如，在他的敦促下，大都会于1973年从纽约收藏家王己千手中收购了可追溯到11世纪至14世纪的25幅中国画。该博物馆还获得了哈里·C·帕卡德(Harry C. Packard)日本艺术收藏中的421件作品，其中一些是在美国能找到的最精美作品;此外还有顾洛阜的中国书画收藏;以及安思远收藏(Robert H. Ellsworth Collection)中的19世纪和20世纪中国画。

Among the most notable pieces now at the Met are “Riverbank,” a colossal Tang dynasty scroll attributed to the 10th-century painter Dong Yuan, and “Summer Mountains,” a Song dynasty landscape painting. Some scholars questioned the authenticity of “Riverbank,” but Professor Fong insisted that it was the real thing, a masterpiece of Chinese painting.

目前大都会的最著名馆藏包括《溪岸图》，一部尺幅巨大的唐代卷轴，作者是10世纪画家董源;以及宋代山水画《夏山图》。一些学者质疑了《溪岸图》的真伪，但方闻坚持认为它是真品，是一件中国画的杰作。

Many of the purchases were financed by the Met or the Dillon Fund, a foundation set up by Mr. Dillon, a Wall Street financier and longtime museum trustee and benefactor who was Treasury secretary under President John F. Kennedy.

许多购买都是由大都会或狄龙基金会(Dillon Fund)资助的，后者是由华尔街街金融家、大都会博物馆长期信托者和捐赠者狄龙设立的基金会，他还曾担任约翰·F·肯尼迪(John F. Kennedy)总统的财政部长。

In 1979, Professor Fong traveled to China with Ms. Astor, another trustee, to conduct research for a new project. Along with Mr. Hearn, Professor Fong had conceived the idea of creating an indoor version of a Chinese scholar’s garden at the Met. It was built with the help of Ms. Astor’s money and is now the Astor Chinese Garden Court.

1979年，方闻教授与另一名董事阿斯特一同前往中国，为一个新项目进行研究。他与何慕文一起构思了在大都会创建室内中国文人园林的想法。它是在阿斯特的帮助下建造的，现在成了大都会内的阿斯特中国庭院(Astor Chinese Garden Court)。

By the time Professor Fong retired from the Met, in 2000, his imprint was on everything from conservation and the planning of exhibitions, to the more than 50 permanent galleries that are now devoted to displaying Asian art.

方闻于2000年从大都会退休，他留下的印记无处不在，从馆藏维护和展览规划，到50多个致力于展示亚洲艺术的固定展厅。

In addition to his wife, Professor Fong is survived by three children, Laurence, Peter and Serena; and two grandchildren.

除了妻子，方闻在世的亲属还包括三名儿女——劳伦斯(Laurence)、彼得(Peter)和塞丽娜(Serena);以及两名孙辈。