Zhang Daqian was perhaps the greatest Chinese artist of the 20th century. He was also a rascal and a forger.
Scholars and collectors revere him. "He is the artist with the greatest range in the entirety of Chinese painting," says Museum of Fine Arts research fellow Joe Scheier-Dolberg. "Zhang is a kind of a hero to Chinese people."
Yet Zhang, who died at 84 in 1983, also used his extensive knowledge of Chinese painting to create forgeries that made their way into the collections of MFA, the British Museum, and the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.
"Zhang was a collector, an authority, and a venerator of tradition who also upstaged it," says De-Nin Lee, an assistant professor of Chinese painting and Asian art history at Bowdoin College. "He was a theatrical person. He had a long white beard and a scholar's robe. Part of the performance was competing with or bettering the expert masters. It was a way to play and to trick his friends."
"Zhang Daqian: Painter, Collector, Forger," a small and revealing exhibit Scheier-Dolberg has organized at the MFA, examines Zhang's colorful legacy through the lens of the museum's own collection.
The centerpiece of the show is a brilliant forgery: "Drinking and singing at the foot of a precipitous mountain." The MFA purchased it in 1957 as a rare work by the 10th-century master Guan Tong. It's a gorgeous, spiraling mountain landscape on silk, mounted on a scroll.
"The MFA recorded it as a landmark acquisition. It would have been the anchor of our early Chinese landscape painting collection," says Scheier-Dolberg.
He guesses that it wasn't until the 1970s or early '80s that museum staffers accepted they had been hoodwinked. Since then, "Drinking and singing" has languished in storage. "The statute of limitations on embarrassment hadn't passed," says Scheier-Dolberg.
But scholars were ferreting out Zhang as far back as the late 1950s. James Cahill, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, knew the artist personally, and he recognized his forgeries early on.
"He was flamboyant. Brilliant, with charisma you can't imagine," says Cahill by phone from his home in Vancouver. "He had a convincing and compelling beard that, the story goes, helped him get a lot of his art collection through customs."
Zhang left China to escape communism in 1949, and he took his extensive collection with him. "All the major museums were buying from Zhang," says Scheier-Dolberg. "They were buying his authentic work. They were also buying his forgeries."
New versions
Zhang excelled at inventing artificial histories for his forgeries. He made counterfeit seals and used antique ones to establish fictional provenance. He mounted "Drinking and Singing" on a scroll made of patterned silks with gold and silver rollers that implied the painting had belonged to a wealthy 19th-century Japanese collector.
He'd begin a forgery by consulting a 12th-century painting catalog of the Chinese imperial collection. Most of the works listed have not survived, and Zhang had an extensive knowledge of the works that did. He'd choose one that had vanished, paint a new version, and present it as a rediscovered masterpiece.
That's what he did with "Drinking and Singing." He fashioned a storage box for the work and asked his friend Pu Xinyu, a cousin of the last emperor of China, to inscribe his appreciation on the lid, giving an insider's thumbs up.
"What takes it over the top is all the accouterments," Scheier-Dolberg says.
Forensic science offers only limited help when it comes to identifying Zhang's forgeries. He used traditional materials; he had studied the dying and manufacture of textiles and knew how to make an old piece of silk look antique.
"The eyeball is still king for Chinese painting connoisseurship," says Scheier-Dolberg. "The only hopeful thing is to look at pigments and say these things did or did not exist. [Zhang] used traditional pigments."
But vanity gives Zhang away in "Drinking and Singing," in which he veers away from traditional materials just once. "He liked titanium whites," Scheier-Dolberg says. They have a little more pizzazz than those made from natural pigments. A small figure on the left of "Drinking and Singing" is painted in titanium white. "It's the only thing here that didn't exist in the 10th century," says Scheier-Dolberg.
Chinese art history includes a longstanding tradition of young artists copying masterpieces. "The training for becoming a painter is imitation," Lee says. The tradition was codified in the 16th century by Dong Qi Cheng, says Lee. "He formulated the idea of transformation. By imitating and replicating it, you make it your own."
"There's a scale of imitation from acceptable practice to deliberate deception," Lee continues. "This one is deliberate deception."
Zhang sold "Drinking and Singing" to New York art dealer Frank Caro, who in turn sold it to the MFA. His imprimatur added to the work's seeming validity. The next year, in 1958, the artist sold another forgery directly to the MFA.
"Wugoucheng Bodhisattva" was even more audacious. It's a silk painting after an eighth-century mural from Dunhuang, a cave repository of early Chinese wall paintings where Zhang studied from 1941 to 1943. It depicts a reclining scholar with a woman at his side. Zhang dated it to 590 AD.
"This is supposed to be 1,500 years old," says Scheier-Dolberg. "Paintings on silk from this date don't survive. He was trying to sell it to the MFA as the oldest painting on silk in existence."
He succeeded, sort of. Both forgeries, says Scheier-Dolberg, "were acquired alongside a raft of masterpieces." Whether museum officials actually believed Zhang's claim about "Wugoucheng Bodhisattva" is questionable, but they didn't mind making the purchase as part of a larger treasure trove of Asian art.
Scrutiny and debate
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has owned a painting since 1997 that scholars still debate. Is "The Riverbank" a 10th-century masterpiece by Dong Yuan or a 20th-century con by Zhang Daqian? The museum maintains it's the former, but encourages scrutiny and debate. Cahill has said "The Riverbank" is a forgery.
"I know it is," he declares. "He does something no 10th-century artist would think. The whole top of the mountain disappears in mist. . . . The water, no early painter would paint the water the way he did."
Lee disagrees. "I was a Cahill student as an undergrad, so I'm predisposed to agree with him," she says. "But as I was looking at it, comparing it to another 10th-century painting, I thought 'The Riverbank' compared favorably. [What Cahill saw] could be explained by overpainting as people repaired damage to it over the years."
The MFA exhibit includes a couple of Zhang's original works. The stunning "Mount Emei of Sichuan" (1953) depicts the artist's native province, with towering mountains rising over placid fir trees. It's in the tradition of Chinese literati painting, which combined painting, poetry, and calligraphy.
His "Red Lotus" (1981) is more fluid, splashed with paint and verging on abstraction. After Zhang left China, he lived in Brazil, California, and Taiwan. He was aware of the rise of abstraction in contemporary Western art. "Red Lotus" straddles the styles of Eastern and Western painting.
Scheier-Dolberg says Zhang's later abstracted work is not such a leap. "There's a thread through traditional Chinese painting of expressionism," he says. "Representation is not abandoned, but it's flexible. At the heart of the work is the hand of the artist, and his personal expression."
Works from Zhang's own prodigious collection wrap up the show, such as the lovely scroll "Autumn Scenery of Tongguan" (1499) by Shen Zhou, a master of the Ming Dynasty. As with much Chinese art, collectors through the ages have actually stamped their seal upon the work. Zhang's seal features calligraphy in a bird script; the characters have birds' heads on them.
"It's very 18th century," says Scheier-Dolberg. "It's an inside joke for the very scholarly class."
Also on view are leaves from a folio of works attributed to Shitao, dated 1703. Scholars are locking horns over this one, too.
"Is one or more [leaf] a forgery?" asks Scheier-Dolberg. "This is either a set of 12 album leaves by Shitao in Zhang's collection, or a forgery he bought, or an original set he added to, or a set he completely forged."
"In the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Shitao was extremely popular in China and Japan," says Cahill. "Zhang, in his 20s and 30s, began to forge Shitao as a specialty. It got so bad, there's still a lot of doubt about several paintings."
That doubt fuels excitement around shows such as "Zhang Daqian: Painter, Collector, Forger." "Scholars have to go into Zhang mode. . . . They have to bring all their scholarly apparatus to play," says Scheier-Dolberg. "It's a hall of mirrors."
