惠特尼美國藝術博物館 MET新分館
When the world was given a pre-opening peek in 1966 at the building designed by Marcel Breuer on East 75th Street and Madison Avenue, the new home of the Whitney museum of American Art, the ceremony was nearly canceled because of a bomb threat, one that would have sent luminaries like Jacqueline Kennedy and Mayor John V. Lindsay into the streets.
東75街與麥迪遜大街交界的地方坐落着一棟馬塞爾·布勞耶(Marcel Breuer)設計的建築。1966年，它成了惠特尼美國藝術博物館的新址。開張之前，儀式差點因爲炸彈威脅被取消，威脅一旦成真，來參加店裏的傑奎琳·肯尼迪(Jacqueline Kennedy)和約翰·V·林賽市長(Mayor John V. Lindsay)等名流就得跑到街上去了。
On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art formally reintroduced the building as the Met Breuer, its new Brutalist outpost for Modern and contemporary art, and the gathering was an altogether quieter affair. The only bombshells were on the walls: Leonardos, Titians, Rembrandts and Turners that at first glance looked so strange amid the Breuer’s trapezoidal windows and glowering-grid ceiling coffers that they seemed to be parts of a conceptual work devised by a wry contemporary artist — maybe Jeff Koons, who collects old masters and was the subject of the Whitney’s send-off to the space in October 2014.
星期二，大都會藝術博物館正式將這棟建築以“大都會布勞耶分館”之名推出，它成了大都會藝術博物館的野獸派據點，展出現當代藝術，這個儀式相對而言比較安靜。“重磅炸彈”都掛在牆上：一眼看上去，透過布勞耶設計的梯形窗子以及帶有陰沉格子的天花板鑲板，達·芬奇、提香、倫勃朗與透納第一眼看上去都是如此奇特，彷彿成了一件概念作品的一部分，由一個愛嘲弄的當代藝術家設計而成——可能是傑夫·昆斯(Jeff Koons)，他專門收集古代大師作品，2014年10月惠特尼博物館離開這棟建築時，主辦的告別展就展出了他的作品。
But Met curators and officials, who migrated from Fifth Avenue in droves on Tuesday for a crowded news media preview of the building, described this sense of dislocation as gratifying for an encyclopedic museum, especially one that has long struggled to bring the masterpieces of the last century into conversation with those from the five or so millenniums preceding.
星期二，許多新聞媒體都來預先參觀這棟建築，大都會博物館的策展人與官員們也陸續從第五大道趕來，他們說，對於一個百科全書式的博物館而言，這種錯位感是令人滿意的，特別是大都會博物館，它長期以來都在努力令上個世紀的藝術傑作與人類五千年左右發展史上的傑作進行對話。
Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, called the move — first proposed more than eight years ago by Leonard A. Lauder, then the Whitney’s chairman, as a way of “keeping the lights burning” — not only a turning point for the Met but “a significant moment for the city.”
這次搬遷是一種“火盡薪傳”的辦法，最早是八年前由當時惠特尼博物館的館長萊昂納多·A·勞德(Leonard A. Lauder)提出的，大都會博物館館長托馬斯·P·坎貝爾(Thomas P. Cambell)說，這次搬遷不僅對於大都會博物館來說是個轉折點，“也是這座城市的重要時刻”。
“This is a masterpiece of midcentury architecture, and we’re going to be reactivating it with a new curatorial spirit and reweaving it in new ways into the cultural fabric of New York City,” he said, standing on the museum’s garden level, at the base of what the critic Ada Louise Huxtable once described as the building’s “disconcertingly top-heavy, inverted pyramidal mass,” a shape that grew on one only slowly, she added, “like a taste for olives or warm beer.”
“這棟建築是上世紀中葉的建築傑作，我們要以新的策展精神振興它，用新的方式讓它融入紐約市的文化經緯，”他來到博物館的花園中，站在主樓之下說，評論家艾達·露易絲·哈克斯塔布爾(Ada Louise Huxtable)曾經評論這棟建築是“令人困惑的頭重腳輕，是顛倒的金字塔形狀”，人們不會很快就喜歡上這種形狀，她補充說：“就像橄欖或者溫吞啤酒的味道。”
But the building — which the Met has leased from the Whitney for eight years and which opens to the public on March 18 — has long since taken its place within the city’s architectural DNA. And in deciding how to reinvent it for a new museum and a new age, John H. Beyer, a founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, the architecture firm that restored the building, said that most of the decisions involved simple, originalist steps backward, to Breuer’s intentions. The bookstore was removed from the northern end of the lobby to open up the floor so visitors immediately sense the broad span between the museum’s load-bearing walls. A partial wall concealing the guts of the old automated coat rack was also removed, Mr. Beyer said, “because that coat rack was as much a part of Breuer’s design as the architecture — he loved it; it was new technology.”
大都會博物館從惠特尼博物館手裏租下了這棟建築，租約是8年，從3月18日開始對公衆開放。自落成以來，它便已帶上了這座城市的建築基因。貝耶·布林德·貝拉(Beyer Blinder Belle)建築公司負責重新裝修這棟建築，公司聯合創始人之一約翰·H·貝耶(John H. Beyer)說，在決定如何將它返修爲新時代的新博物館時，大多數決策都是在布勞耶的原意基礎上，簡單地後退幾步。館內的書店從走廊東邊搬到正對大廳的位置，參觀者可以馬上意識到博物館承重牆之間的寬闊幅度。一部分用來隱藏老式自動衣帽架的牆體也被移除了。貝耶說，“因爲衣帽架是布勞耶建築設計的一部分——他喜歡它；它在當時是一種新技術。”
The building’s few basic materials — concrete, granite, bluestone pavers, bronze for handles and railings and elevator doors — were taken almost back to their elemental states, with only a low-sheen wax applied to the floors. The wood railings were stripped of varnish and finished with Danish oil, as Breuer specified, so that they exude a sense of texture that the architect described as being “close to earth.” The rough, bush-hammered concrete walls, which reveal the black obsidian stones used in their making, were only cleaned and holes in them were plugged, sometimes with obsidian, to mimic the texture around them.
這棟建築只使用了幾種基本材料：水泥、花崗石、青石路面、黃銅把手和欄杆以及電梯門，它們幾乎都回歸到原本的形態，只有地板上打了一點蠟。如布勞耶特別指示的，木質欄杆外沒有噴漆，只塗了一層桐油，這樣就能保持一種質感，如建築師們所說，“貼近大地”。粗糙不平的水泥牆面上露出和水泥時的黑色碎石痕跡，只被清潔過，上面的窟窿被填住了，有的地方是用黑色碎石填補的，以便模仿周圍質材的質感。
“He loved the hard dignity of aging materials,” Mr. Beyer said. “One of the most important parts of restoration is in deciding what not to do. And we didn’t do a lot. But what we did, I think, gives you a clear understanding of the space as he created it.”
“他喜歡陳舊質材散發出的堅硬的莊嚴，”貝耶說。“修復過程中最重要的部分就是決定不要做什麼。我們沒有做太多事情。但我覺得我們所做的事情都會讓人更清晰地理解他所創造的是一個什麼樣的空間。”
In preparing the exhibition that fills the museum’s third and fourth floors, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” which examines, over more than six centuries, the idea of what constitutes a completed work of art, curators from Met departments who rarely see one another except in the cafeteria worked together for months to fill Breuer’s art-friendly spaces with works made by both the living and the very-long dead.
博物館第三、四層的展出名爲“未完成：依然可見的念頭”(Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible)，它回顧六個多世紀以來，關於一件完整藝術品構成的理念，在籌備這個展覽的過程中，平時除了在餐廳外很少見面的大都會博物館各部門策展人們密切合作了幾個月，在布勞耶適合陳列藝術品的空間裏放滿了各種藝術品，有些作品由尚在世的藝術家創作，有些作品的作者早已與世長辭。
“One of the things that’s been so thrilling for us,” said Andrea Bayer, a curator of European paintings, “is to see how different our own paintings look here, and the effect is hard to understate.” Many, particularly from the Renaissance, stand up to Breuer’s unforgiving materials and grids “in a very muscular way,” she said — and one that underscores how much of the contemporary sculpture in the show “draws a straight line all the way back to Michelangelo.”
“其中一件令我們興奮的事情，”歐洲油畫策展人安德烈·貝爾(Andrea Bayer)說，“就是看着我們的油畫掛着這裏，看上去非常不一樣了，這種效果無法忽略。”她說，很多作品，特別是那些來自文藝復興時期的作品，在布勞耶粗獷的材質與網格設計的反襯下，“是一種很有力量的感覺”；而且可以強調出展覽中的當代雕塑在很大程度上“可以直接追溯到米開朗基羅”。
The painter Kerry James Marshall, one of the few living artists among the opening crowd on Tuesday, said that no matter how much his contemporaries might want to deny or push against it, “on some level, in one way or another,” all of us “want to be a part of an institution like the Met.”
畫家凱利·詹姆斯·馬歇爾(Kerry James Marshall)是週二開幕展中爲數不多的在世藝術家之一，他說，不管自己的同代人有多想否認和抵制這種想法，“在某種程度上，不是這樣就是那樣，”我們所有人“都想成爲大都會博物館這樣的機構中的一員”。
“Artists make art because other artists made work that inspires them,” said Mr. Marshall, who has a painting in the “Unfinished” show and whose retrospective will come to the Breuer this fall. “But at a certain point, just coming to the museum to see what other people did in those spaces is unacceptable.”
“藝術家搞藝術是因爲其他藝術家的作品給了他們靈感，”馬歇爾說，他的一幅作品在“未完成”中展出，他的回顧展也將於今年秋天在布勞耶展出。“但是到了某個特定的時候，只是去藝術館看其他人在這些空間裏做了什麼，這是不可接受的。”
For himself, he summed up, exultantly: “I can finally say that I’ve been in an exhibition with Leonardo da Vinci.”
至於他自己，他開心地總結道：“我終於可以說，我和列奧納多·達·芬奇在同一個展覽上展出了。”
