In a move that may lead to closure of a major controversy over the attributions of some early Chinese paintings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has mounted an exhibition of about 100 works that were collected by C. C. Wang, a well-known painter, collector and dealer in New York and will hold an international symposium about problems of authenticating such works in December.

The exhibition includes "Along the Riverbank," a large hanging scroll, shown below, that the museum and C. C. Wang maintain was done by Dong Yuan (d. 962) and which, they say, is one of the greatest Chinese paintings of all time.

Some highly respected experts, however, such as James Cahill, retired professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Sherman Lee, retired director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, have challenged such claims and Cahill has suggested it might be a 20th Century work by Zhang Daqian (also known as Chang Ta-Ch'ien and Chang Dai-chien, a famous painter, collector and forger who died in 1983) from whom Mr. Wang acquired the painting several decades ago.

In his September 3, 1999 review, entitled "A World of Passion, Stroke by Quivering Stroke," in The New York Times of this exhibition, Holland Cotter noted that the attribution of "Along The Riverbank," had created something of a "furor" in the art world and that "Phrases like 'Chinagate' began to pop up on the Internet," an apparent reference to the series of articles in The City Review on the attributions of Chinese art at the Metropolitan Museum.

"The full range of opinion about Riverbank's dating and authenticity will be presented on December 11, when the Museum will host a full-day symposium devoted to the issue of authentication and conoisseurship," the museum announced, adding that Mr. Cahill and Mr. Lee will "offer their reasons for doubting Riverbank's authenticity" and that "Papers in support of Riverbank's early date will be presented by Professor Shou-chien, Director of the Graduate Institute of Art History at the National Taiwan University, who will discuss the stylistic reasons for accepting a 10th Century dating, and Maxwell K. Hearn, Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum and curator of The Artist as Collector, who will present a comparative physical examination of Riverbank and the British Museum's forgery" by Zhang Daqian that is on loan in this exhibition. "Three additional papers will examine other works of questioned attribution," the museum's press release on the exhibition said, not specifying which ones. "A summary of connoisseurship methodologies by Wen Fong, Consultative Chairman and Douglas Dillon Curator of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy at the Metropolitan Museum, will conclude the proceedings," the announcement said.

Wen Fong is a professor at Princeton University from which both Douglas Dillon, former chairman of the museum, and Thomas P. F. Hoving, a former director of the museum, graduated. The major Chinese Art galleries at the museum are named after Mr. Dillon, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and Wen Fong convinced Mr. Hoving to acquire in 1973 for the museum, with great fanfare, 25 paintings from Mr. Wang that it then said were by many of the greatest masters of China's golden era of painting, the Sung and Yuan Dynasties that are between about 650 and 1000 years old.

Subsequently, Wen Fong convinced the museum to make many more Asian Art acquisitions, including the Harry Packard collection of Japanese Art, a purchase that consumed the museum's total acquisition budget for five years and a collection that has been shown since only on a very selective basis.

In 1999, the museum "completed its goal of an entire wing devoted to Asian art…incorporating the largest display space for Chinese painting and calligraphy outside Asia," the museum's press release noted, adding that the space included the C. C. Wang Gallery and the Frances Young Tang Gallery, the latter named in honor of Oscar Tang's late wife. Mr. Tang has promised the museum a gift of 12 paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection, including the Riverbank work. Wen Fong and Oscar Tang are related through marriage.

The new exhibition includes almost 100 works that have been collected by C. C. Wang, almost two-thirds of which are now owned by, or promised gifts to, the Metropolitan. The exhibition also includes works formerly owned by C. C. Wang, who was born in 1907, and now in other collections as well as works still in his possession, several of which are among the most attractive in the exhibition and one of which, labeled by the museum as by Ma Yuan, is shown below. In addition, the show also includes 10 of his own very impressive paintings and calligraphies, especially "Abstraction in Red," which he painted in 1997.

The $60 hard-cover catalogue that accompanies the exhibition does not illustrate most of the works on view but only those that are part of Mr. Tang's promised gift and related works of art elsewhere.

The exhibition, furthermore, does not include all of the 25 paintings of the original 1973 acquisition from C. C. Wang that became the subject of a controversy in 1976 when I reported in The New York Times that many leading Chinese art experts, including Mr. Cahill and Mr. Lee, had problems with some of the attributions. (See The City Review article on "Chinagate" and several other related stories in The City Review listed at the end of this article.)

In 1997, the museum reopened its Chinese Art Galleries and announced that it had received a "promised gift" of 11 other works from the Wang Collection from Oscar Tang including one painting, "Along the Riverbank," that Mr. Wang and the museum maintained was by Dong Yuan (d. 962) and was one of the greatest paintings in the history of art. An article by Judith H. Dobryznski in The New York Times announcing the Tang gift quoted Mr. Wang as described the painting as "This is the very best painting, like the Mona Lisa."

The City Review noted at the time that there were some doubts about its attribution and shortly thereafter an article by Carl Nagin in The New Yorker magazine reported that some famous experts such as James Cahill, did not accept the attribution. (See The City Review article.)

Subsequently, debate over the attribution raged in the letters column of Orientations magazine. (See The City Review article.)

I sent a long letter to Orientations that was not published. (See The City Review article that contains the text of that letter.)

"The collection of C. C. Wang is a unique historical achievement, encompassing many masterpieces dispersed from the Qing imperial collection early in this century," the museum's announcement said without any details of how the paintings were acquired.
The collection is richest in paintings of the 10th through the 14th Century, including Northern Song (960-1126) monumental landscapes, figural narratives and elegant album-size paintings sponsored by the Southern Song court (1127-1279), and the full sweep of scholar painting from its inception in the 10th and 11th centuries to its early flowering during the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368)….The continuation of both the scholarly and courtly traditions during the Ming and Qing dynasties is also well represented, including an especially rich concentration of works by individualist and orthodox masters of the 17th Century, with masterpieces by the individualists Zhu Da (Bada Shanren, 1626-1705) and Shitao (1642-1707) and by the orthodox painters Wu Li (1632-1717) and Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715)," the museum's announcement said.

In a laudatory action, the museum now admits that its attribution of Riverbank to Dong Yuan, which it now says is "attributed to Dong Yuan," is not universally accepted and it noted that some scholars have suggested it "may be a modern fabrication by the renowned painter, connoisseur, and forger Zhang Daqian." "In response to this suggestion, the Museum has borrowed a landscape from the British Museum that was formerly attributed to Dong Yuan's follower, Juran (active ca. 960-95) but which is now acknowledged to be a Zhang forgery. These two paintings are displayed side by side to enable the public to draw its own conclusions," the museum maintained.

It is interesting to note that a major exhibition on Zhang Daqian will be held September 26 to November 20, 1999 at the San Franciso State University's Fine Arts Gallery. The exhibition celebrates the artist's and the university's centennials. It is sponsored by, among others, China Airlines, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the National Museum of History of Taiwan, and is entitled "Chang Dai-chien in California" and it has a spectacular website (Click here to visit its website at http://www.sfsu.edu/~allarts/chang/chang.html) on the Internet with extensive information and bibliography on the artist as well as several very interesting articles on him.

On September 25, 1999, a symposium will be held at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco about the artist with such speakers as James Cahill, Michael Sullian, professor emeritus at Stanford University, Paul Karlstrom, director of the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Gordon Chang, professor at Stanford University, C. C. Wang, the artist and collector, and Hung Liu, artist and professor of art at Mills College.

"Unique in the mastery of historical styles dating back to the 9th Century, reintroduction of brilliant color with painterly modeling, and grand synthesis of these traditions with aspects of Euro-American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, Chang Dai-chien is a singular giant of Chinese painting," wrote Mark Johnson, associate professor of art and gallery director of the art department of the San Francisco State University in his essay, "Chang Dai-chien, A California Reintroduction," on the exhibition's website at http://www.sfsu.edu/~allarts/chang/changessay.html.

Johnson wrote that "The myopic fixation on 'forgery' in the American press and total disregard for the artist's original achievement says more about our national psyche and its passion for scandal than demonstrating any understanding of the issues in Chang Dai-chien's art."

In a November 24, 1991 review in the Washington Post of an exhibition on Chang Dai-chien at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, Paul Richard wrote that the story of the artist's life "is enough to make one gasp." "That amazing, twinkling master, with his long, white wispy beard, his floor-length robes of silk and his favorite pet gibbon chattering beside him - had a hundred different styles, some original, some not. He was a scholar and poet, an insatiable collector and his era's finest forger of antique Chinese art. As romantic as Picasso, he had four wives simultaneously and fathered 16 children….Chang, who fled his homeland in 1949, kept uncaged bears and panthers and fierce Tibetan mastiffs on the landscaped bits of China that he re-created in Brazil and Argentina and at Pebble Beach, Calif. The notoriety he nourished equaled that of Warhol. His marketing was skillful. His brightly colored paintings (he charged by the square foot) these days fetch as much as $500,000 each. His collecting was impressive too. The masterpieces that he sold after leaving China (let's hope they were originals) brought him $1.75 million in 1950s dollars," Richard wrote. (Click here to see the entire article at http://www.sfsu.edu/~allarts/chang/changstory7.html.)

Richard relates that Chang was born in "modest circumstances" in Neijiang, Sichuan Province, in 1899, and that when "his younger brother, Junshou, killed himself at 20, Chang wrote many letters home in his brother's hand to assure his aging mother that her son was still alive." "Chang," he continued, "had 970 old seals (many of them faked) whose impressions he would use to enumerate the long-dead 'owners' of his pictures. At first he carved them carefully, but he later found it easier, and equally deceptive, to employ photo-engraving. Electric hair-dryers proved useful too….When dead emperors were unavailable to authenticate his forgeries, Chang employed the services of his neighbor, Puru, who just happened to be the great-grandson of one emperor and the cousin of another. (In the early 1930s both painters lived in Peking in the old imperial summer palace…)"

"Chang's paintings tend to give headaches to historians. Specialists employed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as well as the Freer, have been taken by his forgeries," Richard wrote.

In 1992, the Asia Society in New York held an exhibition of Chang's work, "Challenging the Past," whose $35 catalogue was written by Shen C. Yu Fu, senior curator of Chinese Art at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Freer Gallery in Washington and Jan Stuart of the Sackler.

According to Mr. Fu, Chang's first forgery was of a work by Shitao.

In an August 30, 1992 review in the Christian Science Monitor of the same show when it was shown at the St. Louis Art Museum, Julie Tilsner wrote that "many of Chang's forgeries are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum." The Asia Society exhibition, however, did not include any references to possible forgeries by the artist at the Metropolitan Museum. (Click here to see the entire Tilsner article at http://www.sfsu.edu/~allarts/chang/changstory3.html.)

Tilsner wrote that Chang had been branded "bourgeois" by the Communists and left China in 1949, the year of the Communist victory, and started "an expatriate's progress that took him to India and Hong Kong, to Argentina and Brazil, to the United States and finally to Taiwan, where he died in 1983."

According to Tilsner, Fu explained that "traditionally the notion of caveat emptor has been much more important in the art marketplace in China: The responsibility for recognizing a fake fell to the buyer, whose connoisseurship was expected to be up to the task. The dealer was not necessarily ill-thought of for selling a work of dubious authenticity."

"It is estimated that Chang produced about 30,000 works in his lifetime, of which about 5,000 can be identified today. Many works by Chang - who became a fervent enemy of communism and supporter of the Taiwan regime - were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution on the mainland," Tilsner noted.

In a January 17, 1999 article in the Washington Post, John Pomfret, the newspaper's Beijing bureau chief, wrote that in 1989 Shen Fu found a box with 475 Chinese seals that had been owned by Chang in an estate near Sao Paulo, Brazil, that was soon to be flooded for a dam project.

The seals were transferred to the Sackler Gallery in Washington with their "ownership in dispute," Pomfret wrote, adding that they "could prove to be a crucial tool in completing one of the great tasks of artistic sleuthing in modern times - unmasking paintings forged by Chang."

"Since 1991, following the completion of an exhibition of Chang at the Sackler," Pomfret continued, "the seals have bounced back and forth between the museum and the Smithsonian's Office of Inspector General, while members of Chang's family have argued with the museum over who should get to keep them….Chang Dai-chien looms like a giant over 20th Century Chinese art. The most versatile and colorful of China's painters in the last 100 years, Chang was a bandit, a Buddhist monk and a playboy….He hobnobbed with spies, palled around with Picasso and spent his last days in a quiet retreat in Taiwan he named the 'Abode of Illusion.'"

According to Pomfret, C. C. Wang bought "Along the Riverbank" in 1956 from Chang, who "amassed a collection of old silk, old ink and old brushes, so that many of his forgeries would pass scientific muster."

"Chang left Neijiang when he was a young man and set off to make his fortune. He was kidnapped by bandits and joined a Buddhist monastery in Jiangsu province for 100 days but left because he wasn't willing to brand Buddhist scriptures into his scalp. Then it was on to Shanghai, which in the Roaring Twenties - as now - enticed hucksters, writers, painters, revolutionaries, dancers, dreamers and schemers. Chang gravitated to Shanghai to be with his brother Chang Shanzi, famed for painting tigers and working as an intelligence agent for the Nationalist government….He borrowed 5,000 pieces of gold to fund a three-year stay copying the paintings in the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang along China's Silk road in the 1940s. Chang fled China in 1949 with the greatest aggregation of art ever to have been smuggled out of China - the "Great Wind Hall" collection. Among the ancient scrolls, Chang also stashed his fakes. Within 10 years, he had sold scores of the paintings to bankroll his unbridled lifestyle. The city of Paris spent $80,000 on a Chang fake. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts bought two. The Ohara Museum in Kurashiki, Japan, bought one. The Freer Gallery bought another….After stints in India, Hong Kong and Argentina, Chang settled outside Sao Paulo…, a hangout for Chinese organized criminals who had been rousted from China by the Communists, such as the infamous Big-Earned Tu and the scabrous thugs of his Green Gang….In the 1950s, Chang spent more than $5 million turning his Sao Paulo estate into the 'Garden of Eight Virtues.'…Chang was close with Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Chinese government on Taiwan. Once a consular official refused to give four of Chang's wives new passports simultaneously, arguing that polygamy was illegal under Chinese law. The official….was quickly transferred to Swaziland, where he died in a car accident," Pomfret wrote.

Chang apparently had Pu Ju, the brother of China's last emperor, Pu Yi, write a comment on a painting he had forged to help attest to its authenticity, Pomfret wrote. ("Puru" quoted above in the article by Richard is probably Pu Ju.)

According to Pomfret, Cahill met Chang in the 1950's and Chang's daughter studied under him. Pomfret wrote that Cahill maintains that early Chinese paintings were true to their surroundings and that "Along the Riverbank" has a section with a stream in the background that "somehow becomes a road in its foreground" and "the tops of the mountains also fade into nothingness, another telltale sign." "The brushwork, Cahill says, is too imprecise to be a Southern Tang. Chinese painters back then were much more exact. 'The Riverbank,' while a masterful work of art, he says, is of the 20th century, not the 10th. Lately, Cahill has had some support. A Japanese art expert, Hironobu Kohoda, wrote recently that, according to his analysis, 'The Riverbank' has no date. A no-time painting means a contemporary piece. But the technique is only possible to be done by Chang Dai-chien.'"

Pomfret said that Maxwell Hearn of the Metropolitan believes that of the six art institutions that maintain they own originals by Dong Yuan only the Metropolitan and the Kurokawa Institute of Ancient Culture in Japan are real and the others are fakes. The other four institutions he was referring to at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, the Forbidden City collection in Beijing, the Shanghai Museum and the Liaoning Museum in China.

Click here to see the full article by John Pomfret at http://www.sfsu.edu/~allarts/chang/changstory1.html.

In his preface to the Metropolitan Museum's new catalogue, Philippe de Montebello, the museum's director, wrote that "in the course of his long career. Mr. Wang has assembled the most comprehensive private collection of Chinese old master paintings formed since the seventeenth century, with particular strengths in monumental landscape painting of the tenth and eleventh centuries, Song figure paintings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Yuan scholar painting of the fourteenth century, and Qing orthodox and individualist paintings of the seventeenth century."

In his catalogue essay on "Riverbank," Wen Fong wrote that "In early Chinese painting no attribution can be accepted without careful examination. There is general agreement that the two finest surviving examples of early Chinese monumental landscape painting are believably signed works by Fan Kuan (active ca. 990-1030…) and Guo Xi (ca. 1000-ca. 1090…). Predating these masters, the founding fathers of the landscape tradition, Jing Hao (ca. 870-930), Guan Tong (active ca. 907-23), and Li Cheng (919-967) in the north and Dong Yuan and Juran (active ca. 960-95) in the south, are known only by paintings attributed to them rather than by authenticated works, or they are known through later copies. A court painter of the Southern Tang kingdom in Nanjing, Dong Yuan is of particular significance to this tradition because works attributed to him inspired major changes in later landscape painting. Leading landscape masters from the Yuan dynasty…through the early twentieth century have sought to re-create Dong Yuan in their own works, while critics and art historians have struggled to sort out the various works attributed to him. Until the early 1980s, two Dong Yuan compositions were recognized as best representing Dong's style: Wintry Groves and Layered Banks…datable stylistically to the tenth century, and The Xiao and Xiang Rivers…, a close copy of Dong's late style dating to the late eleventh century. In 1983, Richard M. Barnhart proposed another painting, Riverbank…, as an early work by Dong Yuan."

"Measuring 87 by 42 7/8 inches, Riverbank is the tallest of all extant early Chinese paintings, as compared with the most celebrated surviving Northern Song landscape scroll, Travelers and Streams and Mountains…, by Fan Kuan, which measures 81 1/4 inches in height," Wen Fong observed.

"In the most thorough analysis of Riverbank to date," he continued, "Richard Barnhart has studied the painting's style, state of preservation, and collectors' seals, which range from the mid-thirteenth to the late fourteenth century. He observes that the painting is formed of two pieces of silk joined down the center (the left piece measures 20 1/4 inches in width, the right piece 23 pieces in width). Nothing that three important attributions to Dong Yuan's follower Juran measure, respectively, 22 5/8, 23 1/2, and 21 7/8 inches in width, he concludes that 23 inches was the approximate width of silk rolls commonly used for paintings throughout the early Northern Song period. He further suggests that in the fourteenth century the two panels of the painting were separated."

"Barnhart," Wen Fong continued, "compares Riverbank stylistically with authenticated works by two lesser tenth-century masters. And he discusses affinities with other Dong Yuan attributions. He concludes that "while there is no way to confirm or to deny the authenticity of the signature, Riverbank gives every indication of being a tenth-century painting, and its importance to the history of Chinese landscape painting can scarcely be overstated."

Wen Fong notes that James Cahill questioned the authenticity of Riverbank as early as 1980 in his Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings and in 1991 cited Riverbank as an example of Zhang's handiwork at a symposium on Zhang Daqian. "The whole composition, to my eye, is full of spongy, ambiguous forms and spatial contradictions," Cahill was quoted by Wen Fong in describing Riverbank.

"Much hangs on the judgment of Riverbank," continued the Cahill quote in Wen Fong's essay. "To admit [it] into the small canon of believably signed, early Chinese paintings would allow us - or oblige us - to rewrite our histories."

"James Cahill, in his repudiation of Riverbank as tenth century, characterizes the brushwork in the painting as 'fuzzy,' but in fact it is precisely this brushwork that defines the tenth-century modeling technique," Wen Fong wrote, adding that "two other tenth-century paintings, Wei Xian's The Lofty Scholar Liang Boluan… and Huang Jucai's…Pheasant and Sparrows, show similarly shaded rock forms delineated by a graded ink wash and softly brushed darker accents, and without a clearly formulated texture pattern." Speaking of Riverbank, Wen Fong observed that its "interlocking mountains show a rich but naturalistic complexity unmatched by any known painted landscape after the tenth century," adding that "As a transitional work between the Tang and the early Song, the visual structure of Riverbank remains notably additive and compartmental in the treatment of forms and spatial juxtapositions….The far valley, with a line of geese leading the eye into the distance…, also shows similarities with such earlier Tang examples as the deep distance in Musicians Riding on an Elephant…at the Shoso-in, dating to the eighth century, and emperor Minghuang's Journey to Shu, attributed to Li Zhaodao (active ca. 670-730), in the National Palace Museum, Taipei….Cahill's description of 'what must be a distant river turn[ing] imperceptibly into a road with people walking on it' appears to be a misreading of the scenery. The zigzag path in the valley leads the eye into the distance, where it ends at the tiny village by water's edge. The additive, compartmentalized treatment of space reflects the conceptual approach of the tenth-century landscape masters - the approach outlined by Jing Hao, with its emphasis on 'thought' (si) and 'scenery' (jing)."

A detail of the area in the painting where the river and a road are close is shown below.

Wen Fong recounts that Zhang Daqian acquired Riverbank probably in late 1938 or early 1939 from Xu Beihong, a painter, in wartime Guilin in Guangxi Province. Beihong had "discovered the painting in Guilin" and at the time the painting was known "mistakenly" as "The Water Village." According to Wen Fong, C. C. Wang acquired the painting from Zhang Daqian in the late 1960's and "had it restored and remounted in Tokyo by the renowned conservator, Meguro Sanji." Wen Fong wrote that Zhang Daqian made several copies of Dong Yuan's work but "it would appear that Zhang Daqian did not recognize the importance of Riverbank" and he quotes Fu Shen (Shen Fu) as writing that "There is no evidence of his ever having made any copy of this work, nor have we found any discussion of this work by him. A possible reason for this is the way the mountain forms in this painting are done with a shading technique, without a clearly defined linear, cun texture method. Neither does the linear pattern of its trees, architecture, or human figures seem extraordinary, so Zhang made no effort to copy or learn from it.'"

Wen Fong concluded that "while Zhang Daqian may have been capable of creating forgeries of works by Dong Yuan by successfully imitating Along the Riverbank at Dust [a different painting from the one at the Metropolitan] and The Xiao and Xiang Rivers, in whose styles he was thoroughly conversant, he could never have painted Riverbank, whose ancient and forgotten forms and techniques were alien and incomprehensible to him."

In any event, Riverbank is a painting whose condition leaves much to be desired. Even with considerable imagination, it cannot compare in power to Fan Kuan's famous work cited above. The museum's catalogue shows a picture of where the painting has been restored, shown below.

To maintain that it is the Mona Lisa is a bit of a stretch since Da Vinci's famous painting is legible and colorful and Riverbank is barely discernible.

It is also a bit of a stretch to underestimate the formidable talents of Chang Dai-chien and the irrefutable fact that he sold this work to C. C. Wang and was known to have made copies of other alleged Dong Yuans.

The Metropolitan is to be congratulated on admitting that there is critical dissent about the work. It is probable that the controversy will not end with the publication of the museum's catalogue and the exhibition. It would have been nice, also, if the catalogue included all the works in this exhibition, which it does not, and if it addressed the many other attribution questions raised by outside experts as indicated in some of the other stories in this series of articles.

The museum's lavish Chinese and Japanese art galleries are magnificent spaces, of course, and the museum's full endorsement of an expansion of its non-Western Art spaces and collections is extremely laudable.