CRI听力:US Expert Gives Art Collection to Chinese University

Art expert Professor Douglas Stone giving a lecture at Peking University in Beijing.

The talk marks the opening of a university exhibition of landscape prints. This includes work by western masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt and Whistler. And they're placed alongside similar Chinese pieces.

After the talk I caught up with Professor Stone in the exhibition.

"Can you think of one painting in particular that we could walk to and you could say a few words about?"

"Peter Bruegel without question. To have the Bruegel is to have the exhibition. It's the most important early landscape etching in western art. 5.59 It's Bruegel's masterpieces as a printmaker, it's a work of breathtaking beauty and it has the correspondence of the magnificent mountains and tiny figures with the Ma Yuan reproduction we have near it of a similar sort of thing."

The Bruegel print shows travelers in a rocky landscape. It's hung next to a peaceful mountain scene painted by Song Dynasty artist Ma Yuan. Professor Stone says he wants to show the similarity of detail between western and Chinese art.

"But these paintings we can look at them and say, how beautiful. When you look at a Chinese scroll painting it's full of things. Look at all the little animals, look at all the little bushes. Every single corner of it is filled with life. I have a book of Ma Yuan which has very good details. That's where I noticed the two little laughing children in the lower part and – it's hard to see it from a distance – but the travelers, they're in nature and they're having the time of their life. It belongs to them."
The exhibition consists of 67 pictures. Most have been bought and permanently donated to the university by Professor Stone himself. He explains why.

"The crucial thing is that there were no collections anywhere in China of Western art. Nowhere. There were loan shows. The Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, they would send pictures for a couple of weeks and then they would go back to Paris and back to Amsterdam. And I wanted there to be a permanent collection so that the students – in Japan, most countries in the world have collections of Western art and of Eastern art but in China because of the economics very few people were in a position to collect even Chinese art, let alone non-Chinese art."

Professor Stone's taught at Peking University for six years. This is not the first time he's donated works of art – some worth thousands of dollars - to Peking University.

"I find teaching here an extraordinary experience. In over 45 years of teaching these are the best students I've ever encountered and this is my thank you to them for having given me such a gratifying experience."

But what do the students themselves think?

"I'm very impressed how the man saved every penny to buy paintings and give them to another country not related to him."

"We common Chinese people usually take everything for granted, especially Chinese paintings. So I want to know how a foreigner looks at these Chinese paintings."

The exhibition Landscape and Cityscape is located at the Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology in Peking University. It runs until March 2012.

For CRI, I'm Dominic Swire