The Case Against The Riverbank: An Indictment in Fourteen Counts (version for delivery at Met symposium, Dec. 11 '99)
I want to express my thanks to Wen Fong, Mike Hearn, Judith Smith, and others at the Met. for inviting me to present my views at this gathering. I'm grateful to them especially for their unfailingly friendly and helpful responses to all my requests and problems throughout the long period that led up to this symposium and the publication of my paper. As for Judith, I can only say that if all academic writers had a Judith Smith to work with, the readability level of scholarly writing would be markedly improved.
It feels odd to be standing here delivering a paper for which the audience response has already been determined and published. In a piece that appeared two years ago one of my colleagues wrote: "The Metropolitan museum is planning an international gathering of scholars to examine their promised gift in yet another public forum, and no doubt Cahill will once again present his view. By then, whatever its original shock value may once have been, it will have come now to resemble a miserable, tattered banner, run up the flagpole once again, to be shot full of more holes and ripped apart until, flapping madly and uselessly, it slowly disappears before our eyes." Whether in the event it will be my 'miserable, tattered banner'
(S --) or another, larger and darker piece of tattered cloth, with a picture on it, that will be shot full of holes, flap madly, and disappear before our eyes, is for you to decide. Naturally enough, I hope for the latter outcome. It's not that I want Riverbank to disappear altogether; but I do want it to disappear from our considerations of early Chinese landscape painting, where it has no place.
(S --.) Riverbank. A number of people have contributed to this paper; some are named in the notes to the published form, others have preferred not to be. I must credit especially Professor Hironobu Kohara with a great deal of help--my paper could almost be considered a collaboration between the two of us. Kohara was, I believe, the first to argue in print against the authenticity of Riverbank. I should add that most specialists in our field, outside a special circle identified with two universities and a museum, are deeply skeptical about Riverbank; I won't list them, and some of them, for whatever reasons, don't want to be named anyway. So Sherman Lee and Kohara and I are only the most conspicuous figures in a much larger corps of non-believers.
The form of my paper was more or less dictated by its subject and aim. The arguments that can be brought against the authenticity of Riverbank are too numerous and diverse to fall easily into a continuous scholarly discourse, and I haven't attempted that, but have organized it instead as a series of counts, or charges. Since the paper has already been published in the symposium volume, I'll use my time this morning mostly for those counts that need slides, assuming that people seriously interested in this controversy will read my paper, along with the others, and withhold final judgement until they have both heard us and read us. I'll only summarize the other, unillustrated sections briefly at the end.
Underlying what follows are three large beliefs. The first is that Riverbank, although attributed to the great 10th century landscapist Dong Yuan, is a forgery made by Zhang Daqian (1899-1983.) I say this in full awareness that it's the most contentious point, and that the thrust of much of the writing that has appeared in defense of the work is to "prove" that Zhang could not possibly have done it, for reasons of style, quality, or physical condition. (You will find, for instance, throughout the published symposium volume statements by supporters of the painting that it cannot possibly be modern or by Zhang, as if saying it often enough and in unison could make it true.) The second assumption is that even the highly versatile Zhang couldn't altogether avoid incorporating traits of his own style into his forgeries, and that his style can be recognized and distinguished from tenth century landscape style. The third is that Zhang, skillful and clever as he was, made mistakes that can be caught, and that together rule out an early origin for the painting.
To the argument that we don't have enough safely datable tenth century paintings to exclude any new contender for that period, I would reply that we do have, and we can. Another evasive tactic is to say: But the painting doesn't look like Zhang Daqian's forgeries, or like a modern painting. Zhang would have been happy to hear this, since it's exactly the response he hoped and worked for. Indeed, one of Zhang's forgeries doesn't look like another, and all of them do their best not to look like modern paintings. The works I'll show in comparisons with Riverbank will mostly not look like it either, in any simple sense. But some of them, made by Zhang Daqian both under his own name and as forgeries, will be shown to have distinctive features in common with Riverbank even when they are otherwise in different styles. Moreover, these distinctive features are not, I believe, to be seen in genuinely early Chinese landscape paintings.
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