"Afterword" to Met talk, sent around to a few people afterwards.
AFTERWORD
The above paper was published in English in the symposium volume Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999, pp. 13-63.) The version delivered at the symposium, which was held at the Metropolitan Museum on December 11, 1999, was necessarily much shorter. But it also included some material that is not in the published paper, and selections from this material are appended here, along with a few notes on the symposium.
Two other papers offered negative views on Riverbank. Sherman Lee’s “Riverbank: A Recent Effort in a Long Tradition” was necessarily brief, because of Lee’s recent illness; it pointed to “discrepancies of style and representation” throughout the painting, and concluded, “The result is a morass of starts, false starts, and half starts that point inexorably to a modern pastiche all too familiar to many of us [i.e. as a work by Zhang Daqian] and unworthy of serious consideration by our serious colleagues.” Hironobu Kohara’s “Notes on the Recent History of Riverbank” supplements my own “Alternative Recent History for Riverbank” which is Count 14 in my paper, but differs from it on a few points, especially in arguing that the Xu Beihong letter is itself a forgery made by Zhang Daqian. Evidence may turn up in future to support one or the other version of “what really happened”; for now, both must remain conjectural, on the basis of the evidence we have. What matters is that both of us identify serious flaws and inconsistencies in the “official” account that show it to be itself a fabrication by Zhang Daqian.
A paper by Maxwell K. Hearn, Curator of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan, titled “A Comparative Physical Analysis of Riverbank and Two Zhang Daqian Forgeries,” which I read only after finishing my own paper, obviously demanded a reply, especially since so many people outside art history believe (mistakenly) that in questions of authenticity, physical evidence always outweighs the stylistic. I added the following section in response to Hearn’s paper:
“I think it was clever of the Met to bring the British Museum's so-called ‘Juran,’ a generally recognized Zhang Daqian fabrication, and hang it beside Riverbank, in the hope that people will say: ‘These two don't look alike, they can't possibly be by the same painter.’ If we were to hang the Dutch forger Van Meegeren's Disciples at Emmaus, the masterwork among his forgeries of Vermeer, done on canvas of Vermeer's period, painstakingly painted over seven months and carefully aged, beside one of Van Meegeren’s later, quicker, and sloppier productions, the effect would be the same, I think. They wouldn't look alike, but they would in fact be by the same painter-forger.
“Some circumstances of that kind must underly the physical differences described in Hearn's paper on the comparative physical analysis of Riverbank and two other Zhang Daqian forgeries: they needn't be more than the differences between a work carefully painted, perhaps on old silk, and skilfully furnished with the attributes of age, vs. others on which less time was spent and less technical expertise lavished in the mounting and aging. The mounting was reportedly done for Riverbank by the late, remarkable mounter Meguro Sanji of Kôkakudô in Tokyo, with whom I spent many enlightening hours on many visits to his studio; he could perform near-miracles of making a painting take on more or less any appearance you chose, making seals and inscriptions appear or disappear, and so forth. As for the silk: early on in this project I turned to the only scholar I know who has made a careful comparative study over some years of old Chinese painting silks, Robert Mowry, Curator at the Sackler Museum at Harvard. He doesn't want to suggest a dating for the silk of Riverbank until he has studied it out from under glass; he's read Mike Hearn's essay and has some questions about it, but since he's here and can speak for himself if he wants to, I'll quote only this from a letter he wrote in March of last year: ‘Even if the silk turns out to be 'old,' I don't think the painting is of the same age.’ And more recently he writes: ‘I assume that old silk was sometimes available to those who searched for it--’ and: ‘If the silk is old, the date of the painting still has to be determined on the basis of style and connoisseurship.’ Which is exactly what I'm doing today. Robert van Gulik (Chinese Pictorial Art, 1962, p. 391) expresses the same view, writing that even if the silk or paper is proven old, it doesn't mean that the painting is of the same age, and he adds, on the basis of his intimate knowledge of the Japanese and Chinese mounters studios and art markets: ‘In a country like China where for centuries antiquity and antiques have been regarded with nearly religious veneration, it is not too difficult to acquire blank sheets of antique paper, and unused rolls of old silk.’ I myself own a painting by the mid-18th century master Li Shizhuo which, the artist writes in his inscription, was done on a piece of Song-period xuan paper.
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