Page 28 - Christies March 16, 2017 The Varata Collection NYC

chairs – perhaps the naissance of the
Virata family taste for both elegant
Chinese Ming furniture and refned
English furniture.

The Viratas afirm that they were

attracted by three aspects of Chinese

furniture: modern form, where pieces

produced 300 to 400 hundred years

ago looked as if they were made

yesterday; beautiful grain and wood

color; and balanced proportion and

joinery. These pieces were unlike the

later heavily carved Qing furniture

generally seen in the Chinese market

Bebe Virata and John F. Kennedy with friends aboard the Queen Mary. in those days. In Philadelphia, Mrs.

碧碧•維勒泰與約翰•F•甘廼迪及友人攝於瑪麗皇后號 Virata purchased her frst piece of

Chinese furniture; on this trip, the

Virata family also met Jean Gordon Lee, the estimable curator of Asian Art at the Philadelphia

Museum of Art. It was Lee who introduced the Viratas to Alice Boney, recently returned from

Japan and dealing from her apartment on Park Avenue.

The Viratas’ introduction to “Miss Boney” enabled them to experience her very special way
of showing great art: her home was elegantly decorated with extraordinary Chinese furniture
and with paintings by Qi Baishi, whom she knew and whose frst exhibition abroad she had
organized in 1950. The elegance of the setting and Boney’s formal grace was something
all of us in the feld revered. She
enjoyed helping curators whether their
institutions had the funds to acquire or
not, and if, like the Brooklyn Museum
where I was a curator and later Chair
of the Asian Art Department, the
institution had few funds but a coterie
of acquiring donors she was even more
pleased to meet.

Around this time, Mrs. Virata rented

an apartment in New York at Olympic

Tower, enabling her to be at ease in

Manhattan and for her son and his

wife to live in the city while he worked

as an investment banker. She didn’t Luis and Libet Virata, New York, 1979.
choose the apartment’s location from 路易與伊麗莎白•維勒泰攝於紐約，1979年。
snobbish taste; rather, she chose it for

its proximity to St. Patrick’s Cathedral,

where she could easily attend mass. It was a lovely location for the Virata family to live

while they enjoyed New York’s many gifts. The 1970s and 1980s were wonderful decades in

26 THE MARIE THERESA L. V I R ATA C O L L E C T I O N OF ASIAN ART: A FAMILY LEGACY