"Riverbank As a Chang Dai-chien Forgery" (Written, on request of Hironobu Kohara, to be published in Japanese in Geijutsu Shinchô.)
The late Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983) was surely the most versatile forger of paintings in the whole history of art. The purported dates of his fabrications range from the late sixth century (“Vimalakirti,” with the date 590 in its inscription, Fig. ---) to recent times, and encompass an astonishing diversity of styles, spanning virtually the whole history of Chinese painting. I first became aware of his forgeries of early painting in 1954-56, when I was a Fulbright student in Japan. Chang Dai-chien had brought some of the paintings he owned (including Riverbank) to Kyoto to be reproduced by the publisher Benridô in the fourth volume of a series titled Taifûdô Meiseki devoted to his collection. I got to know Chang well--we both could speak Japanese--and spent a lot of time with him. I had heard stories of his activity as a forger from my teacher Shûjirô Shimada and others, and saw a “Dunhuang” painting of a Bodhisattva made by him, with an eighth century date in its inscription, in the hands of a Tokyo dealer. (Another of Chang’s “Dunhuang” forgeries with a related inscription was later offered to the Freer Gallery for purchase; laboratory analysis of its pigments proved it to be modern, and the “Tang” silk was pronounced by our Japanese mounter Sugiura to be Japanese.) In Hong Kong, on my way back to the U.S., I saw landscapes purportedly by the tenth century masters Dong Yuan and Juran owned by the collector Chen Rentao, and in Paris a “Han Gan” handscroll painting of horses and groom in the Musée Cernuschi (Fig. ---). Returning to the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (where I would become Curator of Chinese Art) I was shown a handscroll titled “Three Worthies of Wu-chung,” associated loosely with Li Gonglin, which had been acquired by the Gallery while I was away (Fig. ---.) Gradually realizing that all these were Chang Dai-chien’s work, I began making a mental list of them, and trying to analyze the physical and stylistic features that identified them as Chang’s forgeries. This was a time when examples were being acquired for high prices by major museums such the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Fig. ---), the British Museum (Fig. ---), and the Honolulu Academy of Arts (Fig. ---), as well as by private collectors. I did not make my provisional list public, however, until much later, in 1991, when a symposium on Chang Dai-chien was organized by Fu Shen in connection with his exhibition of Chang’s paintings (Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang Dai-chien.) I delivered a paper then on Chang’s forgeries, ending by showing why I suspected the so-called Dong Yuan Riverbank (Fig. 1) to be one of them.
I felt uncomfortable doing this, because the painting was by then owned by my good friend and sometime teacher Wang Chi-ch’ien. I have always had the greatest respect for Wang’s judgements of paintings, and have written about him as one of the two leading practitioners today of traditional Chinese connoisseurship. But I have also come to realize, over many years of watching, that the strengths of that tradition are in judging Yuan and later painting, in which brushwork and individual style are prominent; for Sung and earlier periods, when this is not the case, the methods of traditional Chinese connoisseurs are less effective, I believe, and they can make bad mistakes. Wang Chi-ch’ien and other Chinese connoisseurs feel confident that they can detect Chang’s forgeries of later artists such as Bada Shanren and Shitao, and the best of them usually can. But Chang knew very well the weaknesses of traditional connoisseurs in the early periods, and exploited them in making his “early” forgeries, of which Riverbank is the most successful.
I was not the first to question publicly the authenticity of Riverbank: Hironobu Kohara had already done so in print, in Chûgoku Nansôga nôto 6, 1977, which accompanied a volume of the series Kohara edited, Bunjinga Suihen, China vol. 2, the volume in which Richard Barnhart included Riverbank as a great early work. Kohara, rightly uneasy that his readers would think he shared this view, pointed out the stylistic anomalies that indicated the painting could not be as old as the Song period.
However, in spite of the serious doubts expressed about Riverbank by Kohara, myself, and others, our colleague Wen Fong included it in a group purchase by his brother-in-law Oscar Tang from Wang Chi-ch’ien, eleven paintings intended for gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Wen Fong chaired the Department of Asian Art. The acquisition was hailed in a front-page article in the New York Times (May 19, 1997), with a picture of Riverbank and the claim that it was “the earliest of the three rarest and most important early monumental landscape paintings in the world” (the other two being the well-known masterworks by Fan Kuan and Guo Xi, both in the National Palace Museum, Taipei.) Riverbank was called (quoting Wang Chi-ch’ien) the “Mona Lisa” of Chinese painting.
Some weeks later, a short article appeared in The New Yorker by freelance journalist Carl Nagin, who for years had followed Chang’s career as faker, quoting me as believing Riverbank to be a forgery by Chang Dai-chien. This trouched off an explosion of controversy, with articles on it appearing in many newspapers and magazines. An angry response appeared in Orientations magazine written by Richard Barnhart of Yale University, a former student of Wen Fong who had published the painting several times and is a passionate defender of it. Nagin in turn wrote a response to Barnhart, also for Orientations, quoting, among others, Sherman Lee, retired director of the Cleveland Museum, saying that “the Met made a big mistake” and that if he were quizzed by defenders of the work, he would reply that “any idiot can see that this is a fake, and if you can’t see it, I can’t help you.” The rhetoric on both sides was becoming more and more heated.
At last, on December 11, 1999, a one-day symposium was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, titled “Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting.” The papers were simultaneously published as a book under the same title. The auditorium was packed, with much of the Chinese art community present along with reporters, collectors, and many fascinated laymen. There were ten participants delivering papers and two discussants, Apart from Kohara, Sherman Lee, and myself, and two Chinese elder scholars, all of them (except Fong himself) were former Princeton students who had worked with Wen Fong--or, in one case, with Barnhart. Barnhart also spoke, briefly and again angrily. It was widely recognized, then, that the symposium was decidedly “stacked” in favor of supporters of Riverbank. Kohara was present but unwell, and a brief summary of his paper was read by Wen Fong. It dealt with the recent history of Riverbank and the fabrication of a spurious provenance for it, as Kohara reconstructs it, especially the part played in this by the painter Xu Beihong, who colluded with Chang in the falsifying operation. Sherman Lee, also unwell, but who had spent some hours over two days studying the painting carefully in the gallery before forming a firm opinion of it, read a brief paper in which he pointed out that representationally it is a mess. He began with the pattern on the water: “It is not the shui [of shan-shui] observed in early works; only a modern could fail to see the varying tension when observing water in nature.” As for the landscape masses: “The closer we look at the details, the vaguer and more insubstantial the forms and shapes become.” And Lee 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 [he refers, of course, to the well-recognized forgeries by Chang Dai-chien] and unworthy of serious consideration by our serious colleagues.”
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