惠特尼美国艺术博物馆 MET新分馆

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.

东75街与麦迪逊大街交界的地方坐落着一栋马塞尔·布劳耶(Marcel Breuer)设计的建筑。1966年，它成了惠特尼美国艺术博物馆的新址。开张之前，仪式差点因为炸弹威胁被取消，威胁一旦成真，来参加店里的杰奎琳·肯尼迪(Jacqueline Kennedy)和约翰·V·林赛市长(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，大都会艺术博物馆正式将这栋建筑以“大都会布劳耶分馆”之名推出，它成了大都会艺术博物馆的野兽派据点，展出现当代艺术，这个仪式相对而言比较安静。“重磅炸弹”都挂在墙上：一眼看上去，透过布劳耶设计的梯形窗子以及带有阴沉格子的天花板镶板，达·芬奇、提香、伦勃朗与透纳第一眼看上去都是如此奇特，仿佛成了一件概念作品的一部分，由一个爱嘲弄的当代艺术家设计而成——可能是杰夫·昆斯(Jeff Koons)，他专门收集古代大师作品，2014年10月惠特尼博物馆离开这栋建筑时，主办的告别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，许多新闻媒体都来预先参观这栋建筑，大都会博物馆的策展人与官员们也陆续从第五大道赶来，他们说，对于一个百科全书式的博物馆而言，这种错位感是令人满意的，特别是大都会博物馆，它长期以来都在努力令上个世纪的艺术杰作与人类五千年左右发展史上的杰作进行对话。

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.”

这次搬迁是一种“火尽薪传”的办法，最早是八年前由当时惠特尼博物馆的馆长莱昂纳多·A·劳德(Leonard A. Lauder)提出的，大都会博物馆馆长托马斯·P·坎贝尔(Thomas P. Cambell)说，这次搬迁不仅对于大都会博物馆来说是个转折点，“也是这座城市的重要时刻”。

“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.”

“这栋建筑是上世纪中叶的建筑杰作，我们要以新的策展精神振兴它，用新的方式让它融入纽约市的文化经纬，”他来到博物馆的花园中，站在主楼之下说，评论家艾达·露易丝·哈克斯塔布尔(Ada Louise Huxtable)曾经评论这栋建筑是“令人困惑的头重脚轻，是颠倒的金字塔形状”，人们不会很快就喜欢上这种形状，她补充说：“就像橄榄或者温吞啤酒的味道。”

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.”

大都会博物馆从惠特尼博物馆手里租下了这栋建筑，租约是8年，从3月18日开始对公众开放。自落成以来，它便已带上了这座城市的建筑基因。贝耶·布林德·贝拉(Beyer Blinder Belle)建筑公司负责重新装修这栋建筑，公司联合创始人之一约翰·H·贝耶(John H. Beyer)说，在决定如何将它返修为新时代的新博物馆时，大多数决策都是在布劳耶的原意基础上，简单地后退几步。馆内的书店从走廊东边搬到正对大厅的位置，参观者可以马上意识到博物馆承重墙之间的宽阔幅度。一部分用来隐藏老式自动衣帽架的墙体也被移除了。贝耶说，“因为衣帽架是布劳耶建筑设计的一部分——他喜欢它；它在当时是一种新技术。”

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.

这栋建筑只使用了几种基本材料：水泥、花岗石、青石路面、黄铜把手和栏杆以及电梯门，它们几乎都回归到原本的形态，只有地板上打了一点蜡。如布劳耶特别指示的，木质栏杆外没有喷漆，只涂了一层桐油，这样就能保持一种质感，如建筑师们所说，“贴近大地”。粗糙不平的水泥墙面上露出和水泥时的黑色碎石痕迹，只被清洁过，上面的窟窿被填住了，有的地方是用黑色碎石填补的，以便模仿周围质材的质感。

“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.”

“他喜欢陈旧质材散发出的坚硬的庄严，”贝耶说。“修复过程中最重要的部分就是决定不要做什么。我们没有做太多事情。但我觉得我们所做的事情都会让人更清晰地理解他所创造的是一个什么样的空间。”

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.

博物馆第三、四层的展出名为“未完成：依然可见的念头”(Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible)，它回顾六个多世纪以来，关于一件完整艺术品构成的理念，在筹备这个展览的过程中，平时除了在餐厅外很少见面的大都会博物馆各部门策展人们密切合作了几个月，在布劳耶适合陈列艺术品的空间里放满了各种艺术品，有些作品由尚在世的艺术家创作，有些作品的作者早已与世长辞。

“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.”

“其中一件令我们兴奋的事情，”欧洲油画策展人安德烈·贝尔(Andrea Bayer)说，“就是看着我们的油画挂着这里，看上去非常不一样了，这种效果无法忽略。”她说，很多作品，特别是那些来自文艺复兴时期的作品，在布劳耶粗犷的材质与网格设计的反衬下，“是一种很有力量的感觉”；而且可以强调出展览中的当代雕塑在很大程度上“可以直接追溯到米开朗基罗”。

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.”

画家凯利·詹姆斯·马歇尔(Kerry James Marshall)是周二开幕展中为数不多的在世艺术家之一，他说，不管自己的同代人有多想否认和抵制这种想法，“在某种程度上，不是这样就是那样，”我们所有人“都想成为大都会博物馆这样的机构中的一员”。

“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.”

“艺术家搞艺术是因为其他艺术家的作品给了他们灵感，”马歇尔说，他的一幅作品在“未完成”中展出，他的回顾展也将于今年秋天在布劳耶展出。“但是到了某个特定的时候，只是去艺术馆看其他人在这些空间里做了什么，这是不可接受的。”

For himself, he summed up, exultantly: “I can finally say that I’ve been in an exhibition with Leonardo da Vinci.”

至于他自己，他开心地总结道：“我终于可以说，我和列奥纳多·达·芬奇在同一个展览上展出了。”