James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

More About Old Mr. Zhang and His Finest Production (Or One Of Them)

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Created on Thursday, 19 April 2012 21:47

Written by James Cahill

More About Old Mr. Zhang and His Finest Production (Or One Of Them)

My previous blog ended, after a long build-up, by advising all readers, if they haven’t done so already, to go off and watch the last-minute insert in Addendum 2B, the last item in our now-completed Pure and Remote View series, which is to be found (and watched and listened to) some twenty minutes into that last lecture, the one titled “Riverbank: A Closer Look.” It has been accessible on my website and the IEAS’s for several weeks now, and I have been waiting for responses from colleagues without yet receiving any. Well, one former student, writing me about something else, adds at the end: “Your Zhang Daqian bricks video is great. Something else to look for when I see it.” When she next sees the original painting, that is--a good response: see for yourself. I wish I could still travel to look at it once more, but I can’t, and don’t really need to: the evidence is clear enough from the photographs, and from Rand Chatterjee’s skillful drawing up from them (under my guidance), from scattered places across the surface of the work, the damning, clearly identifying pattern.

Several weeks earlier, about two weeks before these final Addenda were posted on the web, I sent an email out to some twenty colleagues who have been especially engaged in the Riverbank controversy, on one side or the other, giving them a reference to a website that would afford them early access to these Addenda so that they would have a preview and not be surprised and unprepared when they were publicly posted. And then I waited for responses. And what were they? The same as the responses to our two  press  releases for the PRV lecture series; that is: nothing, nil, nada. My well-meant pre-notices sank like stones in the water. I wrote to one of the twenty, someone I’ve believed to be relatively neutral and fair-minded while not one  of my  students, and have been carrying on a correspondence with him since then. It was he who, when I sent him an earlier version of this blog in which I castigated my colleagues for their non-response, wrote back advising against doing this. And, following his good advice, I’ve toned it down considerably.

I did receive, however, a supportive email from a recent correspondent named John Rohrer, who wrote (and I quote with his permission):

“I just finished viewing Addendum 1B: Riverbank: The Controversy, and Addendum 2B: Riverbank: A Closer Look

I understand now why you couldn't just leave well enough alone. I bought and read Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting a few years ago,

And I have to admit I did not know whose opinion was right.

“I am now convinced that you are correct in your attribution on Riverbank. The arguments that really swayed me...

First, your problem with the water being shown with no sense of depth. I have attached some ammunition that I think helps support your observation of the problem with the water representation in Riverbank. The image that I have attached is from page 107 of Zhang Daqian's Chinese Painting published in 1988 by Ho Kungshang in Taiwan. The image shows Zhang creating a uniform pattern of waves that show no depth or recession, similar to the wave pattern that you pointed to. The presentation of water became to Zhang Daqian a stylistic problem not one of occularity. [See Fig. 1 for this image.\

“Second, I think I found Zhang Daqian's signature treatment of tree branches in Riverbank. Zhang Daqian trees are at times 'mind trees' that do not really exist, but instead bend and twist into abstract patterns that could not be found in nature. He tended to leave the unpainted media as the base for some of his trees. Examples are attached. [See Fig. 2 for this image.]

“To quote you "open mind and open eyes"

Your student

John Rohrer”

I wrote him back with thanks and appreciation for his opinions and his pictures, adding “If it was an irrefutable argument before, now it will be irrefutable plus two.” His pictures, taken from Zhang’s own publication of some of his paintings intended for teaching students how to depict water, trees, etc., do indeed match up so closely with the same in Riverbank as to provide still another nail in its coffin. (The time should come soon when it can no long rise out of the coffin, like Count Dracula, to go on plaguing us all.) Rohrer’s three-part juxtaposition of Zhang’s painting of trees--two from his acknowledged pictures flanking the detail from Riverbank (the cover of the Symposium volume!)--is devastatingly convincing as all coming from the same hand, that of my late friend. I reproduce the photos he sent, again with his permission. (Figs. 1 & 2 )

The time will also come, I hope while I am still here to observe it, when this whole affair will be recognized as a case of brilliant and large-scale art forgery that at least matches, and in some respects surpasses, the project of forging Vermeer and other Dutch masters by Hans van Meegeren, I remember  very well when that story “broke” in the 1940s, and was the  subject of numerous articles in the popular press and  several books. (I show and talk about several of van Meegeren’s forgeries briefly in my “Authenticity and Dating” lecture, Addendum 2A.) I read these with great interest, and recall especially that for a time there were still those who said:  “Yes, he made Vermeer forgeries; but the ‘Supper at Emmaus’ [his finest production] can’t possibly be one of them--that, at least, is a great Vermeer painting.” And I expect the same will be true for some time of Zhang’s forgeries; some will be holdouts, saying “Yes, but not Riverbank!” But that position cannot survive for long either; the evidence piles up--or, rather, is increasingly recognized (it’s always been there)--and Riverbank will have to be added into Zhang’s creations, in the end, as “Supper At Emmaus” was added to van Meegeren’s.

And even then, there will still be a few of his works going unrecognized, still treasured and exhibited and published as old paintings, especially those in Chinese museums--I think of two in the Shanghai Museum, one in the Palace Museum, Beijing--perhaps I will identify these in a future blogs. (But the one in Beijing, an “Emperor Huizong” painting of a rock, is already identified in PRV 10B, the second of the two Birds-and-Flowers lectures.) So Zhang Daqian will continue to fool some of the leading scholars and curators in the Chinese art world for a long time to come. You still move among us, old friend, and prove again that Barnum was right: you can fool some of the people all of the time,  and all of the people some of the  time. You can, that is, if you are Zhang Daqian. I will end by reproducing another photograph of him (Fig. 3), which I took from the web, positioning it so that he seems to be gazing up at these words of mine and saying (in Japanese, our common language in which we always conversed): Good, friend Cahill, keep working at it--now that the paintings are out of my hands and into the museums, I’m happy to have them credited to me, instead of to all those old guys. And I respond: OK, Cho-sensei, I’ll go on doing my best to see that they are.

Yours, James Cahill                                                                                                                                                                                                          

All About Old Mr. Zhang

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Created on Sunday, 08 April 2012 03:45

Written by James Cahill

All About Old Mr. Zhang

This morning I awoke thinking, for some reason, about my late friend Zhang Daqian (or Chang Ta-ch’ien,  or Chang Daichien, or whatever--all the same person.) Nearly thirty years after his death, he is still very much in the news among those of us seriously concerned with Chinese painting--and will be even more in the news when a revelation about one of his works (I’ll get back to that below) breaks on the world. So, let me ramble for a while about my old friend.

Those of you who have explored this website know that he haunts it like a ghost--the long piece on his forgeries among “The Writings of JC,” various lectures and papers among the CLPs, reminiscences about him among the  R&Rs. And he turns up over and over, in images and in words, in my video-lectures. What can be added to all that? Well, let me (as I say) ramble for a while about him before trying to answer that question.

One can’t open an auction catalog today for any auction of recent Chinese painters, or read the results of those auctions, without being confronted constantly with his name. There are rich collectors who specialize in assembling as many as they can get of his works.  Sotheby’s Hong Kong “Fine Chinese Paintings” for April 3^rd offered, as lot no. 1271, a piece of his calligraphy called simply “Menu,” framed, estimated at fifty to seventy thousand Hong Kong dollars. Looking at the reproduction and realizing what it was, I laughed aloud. When you went with Zhang for dinner at a restaurant--as I did quite a few times (Peking style in the suburbs of Washington D.C., Szechwan style near Roppongi in Tokyo--a restaurant with his paintings on its walls--others in Taipei, Hong Kong, San Francisco, elsewhere) Zhang never looked at the menu--he knew what the restaurant’s cuisine was, what could be expected of the chef,  and he simply took paper and  brush and wrote out the dinner he wanted and sent it off to the kitchen. And the chef jolly well prepared that dinner, scrambling to find the ingredients if he didn’t already have them on hand. So this piece of Chang’s “calligraphy,” now offered at auction, was one of those menus, quickly written out by Chang to order a dinner at some restaurant, that a chef had saved.

I may have related already, but let me do it again, my regrets over having turned down his request, delivered to me by Zhang’s son, that I write another essay for an  exhibition of his  paintings--I  had done  one, which he liked and often  reprinted, for a 1963 show of them in New York, I think it was at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery. This second request came after he had moved to California and was living at Pebble Beach near Carmel, and had begun painting in a new style in which he splashed ink and color onto the paper as if (but not really) randomly and then added some fine drawing--a few houses, perhaps--to pull it all together into a landscape. Why did I decline? Because I knew that this new style, hailed by some as Zhang’s brilliant response to Abstract Expressionism, was in considerable part adopted because his eyesight was failing--he had diabetes--and he wanted to minimize the need for detailed drawing in his paintings. Splashing was easier. And I didn’t see how I could write about his new style without revealing this truth about it, as I didn’t want to do.  I’ve sometimes regretted turning him down--I could have found a way out of this situation, compromised a bit. And (although this wouldn’t have been a big factor) been rewarded, doubtless, with one or more of the paintings, as I had been for the earlier essay, works of a kind that are now fetching millions of dollars. (I did in fact own a number of Chang’s paintings over the years, acquired cheap or as gifts, but never kept them--I was convinced, like C. C. Wang, that Zhang was too prolific, too facile, and that his works wouldn’t be worth much in future. This in contrast to C.C.’s own, serious paintings--which now are worth far less. Strange trick of history and reputations.)

I have related elsewhere various stories about how Zhang advised me as a collector, how his daughter Sing was my student through the masters degree, and about my first meeting with him--in Kyoto in 1953, when I was a Fulbright student and he was staying at the finest ryokan or Japanese inn in Kyoto, the Sa’ami, with his companion Chu Hsingchai. (Chu, an art journalist and sometime dealer, used his studio name Hsingchai, it was said, because he had dishonored his real name by collaborating with the Japanese during their occupation of China.) Chang had come to Kyoto bringing some of the old paintings he owned to arrange for the publication by Benrido of another volume in his series Ta-feng-t’ang ming-chi.  Anyway, Chang and I at that first meeting soon discovered that we had a common language, Japanese, and chattered away in that. And I have told of how, as we talked about particular paintings and I asked his opinions of them, he would sketch details from them with the brush he was holding--such was his incredible visual memory, his ability to turn his hand to re-creating pretty much any kind of imagery that the whole history of Chinese painting could offer. I write this now because a colleague asks me, in an email I was reading this morning, how it could be that C. C. Wang was fooled by Chang’s fake antique landscape, the one titled Riverbank: surely C.C. would recognize Chang’s hand, since he knew him so well? But Chang could disguise his hand whenever he wanted to, become Shitao or Bada Shanren or some antique landscapist at will. I watched this happen over the many years I knew him, often enough to recognize this extraordinary ability he had, beyond versatility.

So, let me continue with a good Chang Ta-ch’ien story, one that was well-known to those of us in the field back in the years of his flourishing as a forger. Among his specialties was the great Individualist master Shitao--there are still paintings floating around that no one, certainly not myself, can be entirely sure of: are they real Shitaos or Chang’s fakes? The story was related in print by Chu Hsingchai in one of his publications, but it was well-known to insiders before that. Here is the story (I’ll call him Chang in this one, as I did when I first heard it):

Chang hears of a collector who is especially fond of Shitao’s paintings, and goes to visit him. (You should understand that Chang, although known as a  Shitao forger, was  also a recognized authority on Shitao--he published a corpus of his paintings, as I recall, as well as other writings about him.) Chang expresses lavish admiration for the man’s collection, and tells him that he should construct a special gallery to show off his Shitao paintings--all the art-lovers of the region, he says, will flock to see it. The man is inspired by this idea, constructs the gallery as an addition to his residence, and invites Chang back to show it to him with pride. Chang indeed admires the gallery and the collection, but meanwhile is also measuring one of the walls with his eyes, and he tells the man: This is all very impressive, but what you really need now is one large, major Shitao painting to hang on that wall. That would be wonderful, the man responds, but where am I to find such a painting? Just be patient, says Chang, it will turn up in time if you just wait. And indeed, some months afterwards a dealer turns up with a painting that is just what the collector is hoping for, an impressive large Shitao (or would-be Shitao) painting that fits ideally on that wall. The collector, feeling almost too lucky, calls back Chang Ta-ch’ien--who was, as I say, a recognized authority on the artist--to see it and pronounce judgment on it before he buys it. The dealer who is offering it is there. Chang stands gazing at it for a long time, eventually shaking his head and saying: No, a very impressive forgery, but nonetheless a forgery. The collector gives the painting back to the dealer, who hurries frantically after Chang asking:  What are you up to? He was going to buy that painting! And Chang replies: Don’t worry, just wait for some days and then go back and tell the man that I have bought it. The dealer understands, and after a time revisits the collector to tell him that Chang himself has bought the painting, saying he made a mistake in pronouncing it a forgery, that it is really a fine and genuine work by Shitao. The collector is now convinced that Chang tricked him, told him it was a fake so that he could get it for himself. And that painting becomes the one he cannot live without, must have for his collection; he sends the dealer back to Chang offering to pay a higher price for it. But Chang says no, he made a mistake once but now he realizes that this is a fine and genuine Shitao, one that he cannot part with. And the man continues to make higher and higher offers through the dealer, for the one painting that he really must own--until finally--You can guess the rest. Chang at last agrees to let him have this great work by Shitao--which is, of course, one of his own forgeries--for a very high price.

True story? I have no idea. I remember Cheng Shifa taking me to see the collection of a private collector in Shanghai that contained just such a big Shitao painting. (One that seemed genuine to me at the time.) But it’s the kind of trick that Chang was capable of--I can vouch for that. The great Mr. Chang, I knew him well. And liked and admired him, in spite of everything, and learned a lot from him.

Question: But surely all this is in the past--his forgeries couldn’t fool today’s sophisticated specialists, at a place like, for instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Answer: (to which all this has been leading up): Go to my Pure and Remote View video-lecture series, pull down to the most recent, open and watch Addendum 1B, the one titled “Riverbank, the Controversy.” That will answer your question.

Question: But surely there must be some way to prove that Riverbank is a Zhang Daqian forgery, to everybody’s satisfaction, beyond argument?

Answer: I thought you’d never ask.  Now, for what really all this has been leading up to: Go to Addendum 2B, the one titled “Riverbank, A Closer  Look.” About twenty minutes into that (be patient) begins an insertion that I added at the last minute, presenting in words and images a new discovery which, I firmly believe, does exactly that: it proves beyond any remaining doubt, with visual evidence that everyone can see for themselves, that Riverbank is one of Zhang Daqian’s forgeries. I won’t tell you here what it is: find the time to watch it.

That addendum ends, by the way, with a concluding passage in which I show two more photos of Zhang Daqian, one in which he is seated before some of the great Monterey cypress trees, another in which he sits in his garden across the valley from the Palace Museum outside Taipei, his final home, with his daughter Sing standing beside him and smiling. A perfect image--evoked, that is, not reproduced here--to end this very long reminiscence about, and tribute to, my old and good friend Mr. Chang, he of the great beard and the intense inner vitality, or charisma. No photograph can really convey those.

(P.S. For a lengthy and detailed account of the 1999 symposium, go to Carter Horsley’s Chinagate website at http://www.thecityreview.com/symposium.html.)

Two Writer-Teachers On Art: Langer and Kaplan

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Created on Tuesday, 03 April 2012 14:25

Written by James Cahill

Two Writer-Teachers On Art: Langer and Kaplan

Throughout my many published writings (and, more recently, my posted video-lectures) I acknowledge frequently, with a kind of false modesty, that I never  really studied philosophy or aesthetics, and pretty much formed my beliefs about art, such as they are, on my own, by picking up ideas and references from my teachers, Max Loehr and others, and from miscellaneous  reading.  Two people, however, deserve acknowledgement as having influenced heavily my thinking about art: Suzanne Langer and Abraham Kaplan.

I read others, of course, and tried to understand them. In the late 1960s when everybody was reading Foucault I did too, explaining to my classes what lay behind his funny reference (citing Borges) at the beginning of The Order of Things to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” on the subject of dogs. (Chinese encyclopedias don’t collect definitions, they collect references in the literature.) I tried to understand semantic theory and apply it to our subject of study. (The one writer on the subject whom I found especially helpful, whose name I forget, was dismissed by Svetlana Alpers, when I spoke to her about him, as far too popularizing and intelligible to be taken seriously.) Others in our field have read and understood far more than I: John Hay, notably, who as a good Englishman could cite Clive Bell and the rest. His near-namesake Jonathan Hay specializes in citing writers, especially French writers, whom the rest of us have never heard of. (I write this with no disrespect for either--both are people I like and respect.)

Back to Langer and Kaplan: biographical information on both of them is easily accessible on the web, so I won’t copy it out here. I never met Langer, only read her two books Philosophy In a New Key (1942) and Feeling and  Form (1953) and was deeply impressed by them, finding her ideas about how art objects function to deliver their aesthetic impact the most convincing of any I  knew. As for Kaplan, I sat in on a course he gave at the University of Michigan in 1953, it must have been--he was a UCLA professor but also taught at UM for a time. He used Dewey’s book Art As Experience as a basic text, and tried in his lectures to define the artistic or aesthetic experience as distinct from other kinds of experience--the work of art, then, being the thing that arouses or delivers that experience. He tried to define--using the teaching method of drawing answers from the class members and then submitting them to critical evaluation--tried to define, over a number of class sessions, what made some experiences of art better or worse than others: they were more or less complete (the reviewer didn’t arrive late for the concert), informed, prepared for by previous experience of related works, etc. And then, in a summing-up lecture, he delivered his punch-line: if enough people at a given time, people who are properly qualified to have and evaluate aesthetic experiences of a given kind, experience a certain object or event and give it a high rating, that means it is a fine, or even great, work of art. There is, Kaplan pointed out, really no other way to reach a collective evaluation that will hold up--we aren’t, he said, going to get judgments from God.

I may be distorting or misunderstanding his point, but that is my sixty-year-old memory of his teaching. There was a lot more, of course, based on readings of Dewey, Santayana, and others, but none of that stays clearly in my mind now.

Suzanne Langer had learned from the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer a way of thinking about aesthetic experience that recognized it as conveying meaning through what they called non-discursive symbolism--symbolism that doesn’t depend on the logical discourse of language and the thinking behind it, that is, in conveying its meaning and impact. And they recognized the need to engage in creating non-discursive symbols of that kind--in effect, works of art--as a human need as basic as the needs for eating and for sex. (Again, I may well be failing to convey her points fully--I am writing out my long-after understanding. Learned essays on her ideas can be found and read on the web.) Through a kind of symbolism that echoes real experience in a “virtual” way--virtual space for sculpture, virtual time for music, etc.--works of art present or evoke experiences that structurally parallel real-world experiences--at best, they can evoke or convey (how many times have I  recalled and quoted this phrase!) “passages of felt life.” In her Feeling and Form book she elaborates this basic idea for one after another of the arts, including, as I remember, poetry and the dance. And along the way she reveals--again I write this from memory--a deep understanding of all these arts, beyond what one might normally expect of any individual.

I remember being especially impressed at how her understanding of the relationship between artistic expression and ordinary speech and writing agreed with old Chinese ideas--for instance, their belief  (outlined near the beginning of my essay “Confucian Elements in the Theory of Painting”) that when one had reached the limits of what could be expressed in writing, one would break into poetry or song. I forget whether I quoted Langer in that article--I should have.

I used to devise ways in which I could meet and talk with this woman whom I idolized, but none of them ever worked out, alas. Alongside my list of notable people I knew during this long life, I could make a list of people I should have sought out and talked with, but failed to--Robert H. van Gulik was another. And writing in this way about people whom I never met but who influenced me heavily through their writings raises the question of the difference between knowing a person face-to-face and only reading her or his writings--another question recognized and dealt with by the old Chinese, for instance in colophons on paintings that, they say, “make you feel as though you were meeting the man himself.” Perhaps my success in making Chinese writings and works of art more accessible to popular audiences depends in some part on such fusions or correspondences in my mind between the beliefs and expressions of the old Chinese and some in our own culture--for instance, my early (and ultimately wrong-headed) argument that the expressive-brushwork aesthetic of Chinese literati painting anticipated the expressive method of Abstract Expressionist painting, or my more recent (right, I think) association of the history of Chinese painting through Song with Gombrich’s kind of quasi-progress toward greater and greater lifelikeness. We are cautioned endlessly, and properly, by sterner-minded critics against attempting that kind of association, but…

And that brings me to my final question for today: How far has my success as a scholar-writer, such as it is, depended on my taking stands and approaches that my more severe-thinking and theoretically-grounded colleagues have scrupulously avoided? I have been charged with that, and have never troubled to deny it, and certainly don’t mean to do so now, at this late point in a very long and generally successful career. And with that dangerously self-satisfied observation I end this and remain, your unrepentant blogger,

James Cahill