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October 31, 2014

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Professor’s passion to bring Western art to China

HONORE Daumier (1808-79), a famous French printmaker, caricaturist, painter and sculptor, made a famous series “Voyage to China” between 1843 and 1845, without ever having set foot in the country.

He imagined visually what the country was like and how it would appear to French people traveling to China, from getting their visas to their stunned reactions at experiencing a completely different country and culture.

The series, among 78 of Daumier’s featured works, is on exhibition at Shanghai’s Xuhui Library through November 17, courtesy of a man who has not only made voyages to China but comes back every year and just received China’s prestigious National Friendship Award at the Great Hall of the People.

“It’s a great honor and I feel very pleased to have been awarded,” says Donald Stone, who donated the Daumier works to the Sackler Museum of Art and Archeology at Peking University and received the award for his contributions in education for Chinese people.

“It has been an amazing experience. But I’m also very glad because I’m the first from Bei Da (Peking University) to receive it. The award is overwhelmingly business people and scientists,” he says.

“My life really began in 1982 and reached a peak in 2006, which has continued to the present,” the professor, who retired in the US and is now senior professor with the English Department of Peking University, tells Shanghai Daily.

In 1982, Stone, then a teaching assistant at Harvard University, met Chinese visiting scholar Zhu Hong, and later was invited to teach the fall semester at Capital Normal University in Beijing, then the Beijing Teachers College.

He calls it “a transformative life experience.”

“The students were the finest I had ever encountered,” recalls the professor, who received his degrees from Berkeley and Harvard and who had been teaching for 16 years at Harvard, Queens College and City University of New York.

“Finest,” “extraordinary” and “inquisitive” are also the words he uses the most for his current students at Peking University. Many of them call him lao yeye, or grandpa.

“He has so much passion in what he teaches and what he does, and that has a huge influence on us, especially when there are fewer and fewer people going into academics in social science and literature and arts today,” says He Jianfeng, Stone’s student and assistant who is prepping for TOEFL and applications for PhD programs in the United States.

In 1991, Stone came back to China as a guest of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, and since 1997 he has been making visits almost yearly, teaching and giving lectures at various Chinese institutions.

In 2006, the professor retired in the US and joined the English Department at Peking University, where he serves as senior professor.

“If I stayed back in the US, I would have felt useless,” he says while walking the twisting, tree-lined paths of the Peking University campus, pointing out the traditional Chinese-style buildings and students passing by.

“And teaching here, at this astonishingly beautiful campus, my students inspire and rejuvenate me all the time. They are very curious, eager to learn more than anyone I have seen. And I appreciate the fact that I can teach not only my specialties, the English novel, Victorian poetry, etc, but also in areas very close to my heart, such as art, music and film, which I had not been given opportunities before,” he says.

“Aspects of Western Culture” is a course popular with his students, in which they read Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, and listen to Mozart and Verdi operas, and watch films by Fellini, Truffaut and Hitchcock.

Stone is still good friends with many of his students from that first semester in China in 1982, and all that followed. Delight fills the space when he talks about the growth and life stories of these students.

Little for Western art on campus

That pride and happiness are nearly topped when he talks about his art collection and art exhibitions.

“I was sorry to see that Western art was given little if any place in the Chinese curriculum,” Stone explains. “American colleges like Harvard, Yale and Princeton have superb collections of (and academic authorities on )Chinese art, but we didn’t know of existence of a collection of Western art in any Chinese universities. And so — to thank the college and country that have given me such fulfilment — I decided to put together a collection of Western art for Bei Da.”

Stone made his first acquisition of art at the age of 17, a Rembrandt etching, he remembers. Etchings, woodcuts, lithographs and drawings constitute the majority of his collection.

“Woodcuts and lithographs, they were first made so that people who are not wealthy were able to afford a genuine piece of art,” he says.

The professor has donated more than 320 works from his collection to the Sackler Museum of Peking University and has willed other works from his collection to the museum, as well. For recent acquisitions, Stone has dug into his pension as a retired professor in the US.

“I’m very happy that I have made the decision,” he says as he points out a student who is closely observing a Picasso drawing.

“Many Chinese students, not just from Bei Da, who study Western art or woodcuts, can learn from real pieces from masters here, instead of just reading about them in textbooks or traveling far to Paris or New York to see them.”

The old man betrays a naughty smile, proud and witty and says, “And I just acquired another Picasso for the museum at a New York auction.”

He is unstoppable when talking about the collection and the exhibitions in the museum, including one devoted to Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) with a complete set of his lithographs for Hamlet, one on 18th-century prints, one on 19th century and one on 20th.

“And this is my most proud donation to the museum,” he says, pointing at a stone statue of a woman from the Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 220) displayed at the museum’s entrance.

“She had been sitting on the table of my New York apartment for years, with her mouth shut straight and tipping down as if she were sad. But look at her, she is now smiling,” he says, pointing to her mouth. “It’s tipping upward, she had a smile the minute I brought her back to China.”

“Honore Daumier: Michelangelo of the People” — collection from the Sackler Museum of Art and Archeology at Peking University

Date: Through November 17 (closed Mondays), Tuesday-Wednesday, Friday-Sunday, 9am-8:30pm; Thursday, 1-8:30pm

Venue: Xuhui Library, 80 Nandan Rd E.

Tel: 6427-1176




 

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