James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Correspondence With Jerome Silbergeld About Riverbank Revelation

 

Correspondence With Jerome Silbergeld About Riverbank  Revelation

What follows is the correspondence I have had with Jerome Silbergeld over the past two weeks or so. Early in February I had sent out to some  twenty people, colleagues who had been somehow involved in the Riverbank affair, on one  side or the  other,  giving them advance access to the two Addenda Part Twos that conclude my Pure and Remote View series, one of them revealing and documenting more about the early stages of that  affair leading up to the 1999 Authenticity Symposium at the Met,  the other presenting once again the stylistic arguments why it can’t possibly be an early painting and must be a Zhang  Daqian forgery--with a last-minute insert presenting what I believe to be ultimate  visual evidence for this, beyond controversy. After I had waited another several weeks for responses and got none (or only a brief one from a former student) I wrote to  Jerome Silbergeld, old friend whom I have always taken (and still take) to be fair-minded and open to new ideas and arguments--we have engaged in a number of them over the years. He responded, I wrote back--and  so  forth, producing the long  correspondence that will be printed below. I should point out that Jerome seems to send his messages from a Blackberry or Iphone or something like that, so that they come  through with  no capitals. I have refrained from editing these responses in any way--they are entirely as he sent them. (I myself have never used or owned one of these hand-held devices, not even a cellphone--this certainly places me in medieval or even antediluvian times, where I am  entirely comfortable.)

So, here is the Silbergeld-Cahill Riverbank Correspondence 2012.

Silbergeld, Jerome

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Jerome,

As an old friend, take a moment to fill me in on why my great revelation, sent to some twenty people ahead of the public posting so that those most involved could react, why this has been  met with--total  silence.  Not a word from anybody. Is everybody simply stunned? Haven’t you all had time to watch & absorb it yet, and respond to it? Is some kind of suppression underway, by which nobody is going to talk about it? Our second press release similarly: sent out to lots of editors of publications, what should be big news, no response at all. Carl Nagin, who broke the original Riverbank affair in a brief New Yorker piece (as you remember), is writing another which  I hope will have  some effect--unclear yet where it will appear. What has WF’s  response been? Any at all? Or are we, as I say, witnessing a grand conspiracy of silence? Anyway, please write when you have time and give me some sense of your sense of what’s going on, or not going on, and why, and what we should do about it,  if anything.

Best, Jim

Dear Jim,

I can't begin to speak for others, and certainly not for Wen who as you know can carry on his ideas without change despite whatever new encounters come his way. So speaking just for myself, time and busyness is a major factor. With all my travel (Ann Arbor, Kansas, Toronto, Baltimore) and a death in the family, I couldn't get to any of this until about two weeks ago, then watched half of your new material, was tempted to write you something tentatively, then was interrupted again. But under the impulse of your note today, I've watched more of it, almost but not quite all. As you know, I've long ago staked out a wide middle ground as a connoisseurial agnostic. Not that I don't have opinions, but I don't see why anyone should take them too seriously (well, my students should perhaps, and occasionally some others do -- I share my thoughts with Bob Harrist, sometimes to actual effect). Being a referee in the matter came naturally to me because I am genuinely respectful of all sides and tend to think, as you know, that recovering the truth is not always possible (there is a truth, but access is restricted). In this case, I think your strongest new emphasis has to do with the question of the presumably artificial treatment of the silk. That pattern certainly cannot be easily dismissed. I remain somehow unconvinced that Zhang, specifically, was a good enough artist or forger to have produced this work and although you show many comparables, it seems to me one could show many others that might argue for other possibilities. Of course I don't take it as an authentic Dong Yuan but I'm a tough one to convince of anything, and I hope you don't take that as a personal matter. You have a better "eye" than WF, and I share your view about many of the works in the original 1973 purchase of 25 paintings from C.C. But for example, I don't think that the Met's Qian Xuan Wang Xizhi Watching Geese is authentic and I believe you do, and I think that their Li Gonglin Xiaojing tu as an absolute dog (I may have convinced Bob of that), so I don't think you're going to appreciate my views any more than some folks appreciate yours or Wen's. THAT is the state of our field, quite confused, but if you'll forgive me, that doesn't bother me as much as it interests me. I now have my students practicing what I call post-post-connoisseurship, which is the rejection of the rejection of connoisseurship but (usually) without conclusions -- a kind of Heisenberg approach with odds on various possibilities, not concrete results. In the case of Riverbank, my own stylistic judgment aside, I am stymied by some social considerations. C.C. knew Zhang Daqian and his hand and his forgeries as well as anyone. I wonder why you think he was so easily "taken" in this case. Also, given the tale that was told regarding the trade for the Jin Nong, Xu Beihong's supposed involvement in this, etc -- all pretty darned wierd, it's true -- and your dating of the forgery to the early 1950s, and Xie Zhiliu's involvement, I wonder what you now make of all this, especially Xie Zhiliu, who it seems would have been well aware of the appropriation of his name in the matter. I think you are fond of detective tales, and this is certainly one of them. Finally, do you know what Fu Shen's take on all this is? I have never taken the opportunity to ask him about it and should know but do not. In the end, I can only encourage you to continue to speak your mind and not depend on the unpredictable results of your colleagues in the field. This is one for the ages.

All the best,

Jerome

PS. One of my students is finishing up her dissertation on the Palace Banquet painting, which by any standards, or by my standards at least, is a far better and more important painting than Riverbank. I believe that the Met took actual ownership of that painting by the end of last year -- at least that was intended.

PPS., Wen will be publishing on Riverbank again, sometime later on, under Tang Center auspices which does not imply our endorsement of his view.

Dear Jerome,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, and with such a  lengthy and informative response. (I remember Svetlana once writing me “Thanks Jim for your fulsome response” and I had to tell her to look it up.) I won’t try to answer all your points--I’ve done my best, and if you still aren’t convinced, that’s the way it is, no help for it. I don’t like leaving things I’m sure about and care about unresolved, and I thought that when I show with lots of close-in details how the person who did the “aging” on Zhang’s fakes on silk used a distinctive, unmistakable pattern of ripping the silk, which can be seen on all of his fakes on silk but not on genuinely old paintings, and then I show how it’s all over Riverbank, as I do  in my Addendum 2B, “Riverbank, A Closer Look,” that would have to  mark the end of skepticism, no way of holding out against that. But I guess I was wrong--or haven’t you watched that last bit yet? I respect you, as always, but how anyone can watch that and still argue for Riverbank as some kind of old painting--well, I won’t continue. Please, go back and watch that last bit again? From about 20 minutes in, where I begin showing close-ups of Chang’s fakes on silk, and then a series of close-ups of Riverbank?

Yes, Wen is going to be publishing on Riverbank again,  I suppose in connection with its showing in the  coming Shanghai  Museum exhibition. And it will keep  coming back & back, like the Monster They Couldn’t Kill in a bad  Hollywood horror movie.

Various points in your email that I should respond to--quite  legitimate questions you raise; I’ll do that later. I  just wanted to off this Frustrated Old Person’s Message first--WILL  NOTHING EVER CONVINCE THEM? Augh.

Best, Jim

Dear Jerome,

Now I see that you wrote in your email that you had looked at  “nearly all but not quite all” of my videos--which means you hadn’t yet looked through the very last, the one with the (I  think)  big revelation about Riverbank, titled Riverbank: A Closer Look. I do believe--hope--that when you see that, you will (like others who have seen it) recognize it as more or less definitive proof that Riverbank is a  Chang Ta-ch’ien fake. (The other Addendum Part 2, which is about the “Authenticity” symposium and how heavily it was stacked, and about other people who believe as I do but didn’t go public about it, should interest you also--you appear in it, positively I assure you. And there are some pretty interesting revelations in that one too.)

Chang, as I explain there and elsewhere, took advantage of one big failing in traditional Chinese connoisseurship, one that I keep coming back to--necessarily, I think--at various points in my lecture series. I make it clear from the first lecture on that C.C. Wang was one of my major teachers, from whom I learned a lot. But I also have to point out, in several places, that because the Chinese system of connoisseurship depends so heavily on recognizing the hand of the artist, on brushwork, all that, it doesn’t work (mostly, literati ptg being an exception) for Song and earlier painting. And Chang was able to paint in a no-brushwork manner, as I show with lots of details. And CC was taken in by this and others of his fakes--he also bought, shortly before his death, for a high price at a New York auction, the handscroll loosely attrib. to Yan Wengui that had been in the Juncunc Collection. I show it in this last lecture, along with others of Chang’s fakes, before turning to Riverbank; and when you see it, and the comparisons of details with good Song paintings, you’ll understand better what I’m talking about. Mountain forms with absolutely no structure,  flat patterns imposed on flat shapes.  I have no compunction in making these demands on your time because it’s important to me that you understand this argument of mine while I’m around to read your response.

There are still more interesting things in your long email that I must respond to--the Li Gonglin not real?!! But Dick wrote a whole book  about it!?) Those will have to come later.

Best, Jim

Jim,

Quick notes. Yes, the symposium lineup was ridiculously stacked against you. We all saw that at the time. Strangely, though, and I don't know if you know this

and I still don't really understand it, I was firmly instructed not to call on CC himself -- which of course I did, conspiring with Arnold to bring up this request for CC to speak. And re. Li Gonglin, Bob Harrist, too, has written

extensively on it but now at least has been persuaded to have serious doubts about it.

Jerome

PS. One of my students is finishing up her dissertation on the Palace Banquet painting, which by any standards, or by my standards at least, is a far better and more important painting than Riverbank. I believe that the Met took actual ownership of that painting by the end of last year -- at least that was intended.

Jerome: I failed to respond to this. If you mean the painting with lots of female  figures and architecture that Mike Hearn published a good article  on,  I agree completely--old and important painting,  one of CC’s that I always admired.  I spend some time on it in one of my two Five Dynasties lectures (guessing at that date for the original of which this is a late Song copy?), accept  Mike’s idea about the subject, and show two  other paintings with  more or less the same subject which happened to be in New York at the same time--I recall writing Mike that  he could  bring them together for an exhibition. Joke, but I show and discuss the other two, show details  from the Palace Banquet including the ink-monochrome landscapes on the walls, etc. Tell your student to watch that and write me  what she thinks of it--right or  wrong. It’s about 40 minutes into Lecture 5.

I had dinner Friday night with Xu Beihong’s daughter Fongfong, whom  I’ve known  since she turned up many years ago in Berkeley and  we took  her in and helped her get started, eventually at Stanford. I brought up; again the  matter of her father having helped out Zhang Daqian--there’s no question that he did, inscriptions by  him etc. trying to establish that  phony provenance. I told her it was no discredit to her  father--Chinese artists & collectors  did this all the time to help their  friends,  as  CCWang once explained to  me  at length--costs them nothing much  and they can share the proceeds somehow--look at all the major people who write  colophons to the Cernuschi’s fake “Han Gan,” another creation of Zhang Daqian, or others of his. Similarly for Xie Zhiliu--he helped  out an old  friend, as did lots of others. Also Ding Xiyuan, who turned up at the symposium. Early on they--and Wen Fong and others--were making much of a supposed letter trying to give credence to that story about Riverbank--later they dropped it. It’s another writing by Xu Beihong aimed at supporting their story--Xu’s first wife  got  it in her divorce settlement before she moved to Taipei, and as I  relate in one of my later writings  on the subject, anybody  can see it in a Taipei dealer’s place. The whole “provenance” falls apart at numerous places when you start really looking at it. Anyway, I await with interest your response to my  “revelation” in my last Addendum part 2. I wrote a blog with Zhang Daqian remembrances and stories for  my RA in Vancouver to post on my  website, as he’s done--look at it  there (jamescahill.info)--I relate a great Zhang story, an old one that most people now don’t know. And send them off to look at my Revelation at the end.

So, awaiting your response when you find time (I really want to see this matter settled while I’m  still here), Jim

dear jim,

i have been writing something in my usual obsessive way -- for shanghai, further down the line, post-U.S. show -- and when i get in the groove i hate to get bounced out of it so i turn other things off.  (it's also my first sabbatical semester since the late 1980s, although with grad students and on-the-road lectures it hasn't provided much extra time. anyhow, that's my excuse for not seeing all of your online lecture yet. but let me respond to your blog without having seen the lecture, with comments on two aspects of it. and i am thinking psychologically, as you are but differently. you are wondering how to rouse people to a level of response, as hasn't happened yet; i am sympathetic with that but don't know what the best way is. so for one thing, i think it is premature and counterproductive to label type B as intellectually dishonest. i think i grasp from the blog itself the gist of your latest additional argument, and if so, then it would seem that what people should do (and which you have presumably done already yourself) is to test this by looking hard for other examples of the same (i think you call it brickwork; whatever, the artificial ageing of the silk). maybe someone will turn up something that you missed, and that's entirely legit and to the point. don't put people down for wanting to do that. what you don't want to happen is what you try to guard against in your postscript, and that's the ZZZ response. but rather than excoriating people for nonresponsiveness -- people do that all the time -- why don't you just claim victory until someone arises to dislodge you. that is, from your point of view, emphasize the positive. you know and i know that it's hard for men (and women) of advocacy to change their minds, but even if you nudge us halfway in your direction, in a case like this, that would be quite an achievement. you need to avoid anything counterproductive, like pushing more of us into an even deeper silence. (i'm sure you will ask, does it get any deeper?) but exploit the gap between this painting being thought of as an important early painting and a bad early painting -- not that early must mean good (i think you hold early to a higher standard than i would), but i think there are very few of our colleagues who think this is a good early painting and lot who think it's maybe early but not very good. it's the latter you want to budge, and they are holding to a somewhat tenuous position, so go for them. the postscript doesn't help.

jerome

ps. i have seen your online lecture section on the "palace banquet" painting and really liked it, especially the two comparison pieces. i don't think that the paintings-within-paintings force quite as late a date as southern song but it's hard to say, and it could be that late; my tendency would have been to say early 12th century. i set my student to a different task, the one of dealing with it as real-or-fantasy architecture: how well can one draw a workable ground plan of the place (answer: partly, only; she's done a very good job with this) and where are the gaps between real architecture and architectural fiction (answer: this can be pinned down to several specifics). also, this is clearly only 1/2 or 1/4 or 1/whatever of a larger original set. where would this part have fit into the whole, and what would the other portion(s) have looked like? this is, today at least, counterfactual, but i think that it is at least partly answerable nonetheless. i'm disappointed that it won't be going to the shanghai exhibition and wonder why not. it was number 2 on the original list. i'll try to find out from mike hearn the answer to this and will let you know if i do.

Jerome,

I don’t mean to try to draw you into more Riverbank argument, but want to make my position clear, with respect to the various positions you outline in your email.  For me, the old painting/later painting, good painting/bad painting distinctions are all artificial and irrelevant. I want it to be recognized as a modern work, a fake by  Chang Ta-ch’ien; I want it out of our writings & lectures on old Chinese landscape painting forever; I know what it is, can prove what it is, have piled up evidence way beyond what should have been needed to shoot the painting down; and am simply frustrated at this  point by  all attempts to circumvent that  simple recognition.

Also, and separately, I hope you agree when you do find time to look at the last lecture (Addendum 2B) that the pattern of artificial silk-breaking that I show  over & over in Chang’s recognized fakes, and then show, just the same, here & there in Riverbank (and we  could have added more), is distinctive enough, different enough from anything to be found on genuinely old paintings (why, if it were genuine damage from age & mistreatment, etc., would it be scattered in patches so quasi-evenly over the whole surface?) that I really believe it’s decisive, beyond challenge, so that… . etc.,leading to the judgment of intellectual dishonesty, which I’ll try not  to spell out as I did, but find it hard to hold in--

Jim

Jim,

OK, I'm back on email. This morning, I had a half-hour talk with Freda, who is briefly at Princeton. I don't know if she is one of your designated 20 recipients or not and therefore whether or not she has seen you Addendum 2B. So I mentioned the matter in an indirect way, and not surprisingly, she commented that it was the technical studies that Mike Hearn had done of the materials which convinced her of the "earliness" (Song? Yuan?) of the painting. It is, of course, possible that this is a new painting on old, newly distressed silk. But her comment reinforces my sense that rather than trying to convince those of us who can't see the difference between 10th and 20th century in style that you do in the painting and don't know much about materials that you should try to convince the few who do know about materials to take your latest observations (still unseen by me; sorry!) into account with an open mind and see how they effect their sense of the overall equation. I can tell that your patience has pretty much run out, but all I can counsel is "patience." Let those who are knowledgable accept or, with the additional time it would take, try to refute your most recent claim and see what that comes to. I think that most of us would look on with genuine interest - I am not invested in any particular outcome but obviously find all of this enormously instructive, and I would like to continue learning from this case. Such a shame that John Winter is lost to us: there was a deeply knowledgable and eminently fair-minded player who could be a far better referee of the matter than I was. Is there no such other person around today?

Jerome

Dear Jerome,

Thanks for continuing to be engaged & advising me--this is all  very helpful.

Yes, citing Mike’s study of the silk etc. is one way out. WF did that in his paper for the symposium, saying that it proved that Riverbank couldn’t possibly be a modern forgery by Chang Daqian. I cited this in my paper, and then the long footnote in his old “Forgeries” article telling how the Bodhisattva that is his main example there of Chang’s fakes was put through an exhaustive technical examination--the silk that is--at the Kyoto Nat’l Museum, and came through so positively that they were writing a scholarly article on it as a fine and reliable example of Tang-period silk--until they learned the truth. And WF concluded that we can’t trust technical exams, need to use our eyes; and I said that between the 1957 WF and the 1999 one, I would choose to believe the early one. And I still feel that way--he was right back then. The one person I know who has really made a serious study of the silk  on which old Chinese paintings are done,  Bob Mowry (he  hasn’t published on this, although I’ve urged him to  for  years) wrote me--I cite this in my Addendum 1B and show his letter as I remember--wrote that even if the silk of Riverbank were really old, he wouldn’t accept it as an old painting. Likewise their clever trick of borrowing the BM “Juran” to hang beside it, and saying: Look, they don’t look  alike! Therefore…

So…

Best, Jim

4.22.2012

dear Jim,

i've finally gotten around to your addendum 2B and your latest blog, and you may be disappointed by my response, but let's just say this is an initial response only and i suggested earlier that i would prefer to play the referee's role than that of the scorekeeper and emphasize looking at both sides of the situation. to use my referee's lingo, i've got to say, you clearly feel like you've gotten in a winning shot at the buzzer, but as far as others are concerned i don't think you can count on them regarding this as a slam-dunk. you may still find yourself operating in some kind of a parallel ball court! so let me respond with a few thoughts on two different counts. first, the new material, the so-called artificial distressing of the silk. and second, the trees, the water, the old stylistic stuff.

let's assume, to begin with, that you are right, that the distressing of the silk ought to run perpendicular to the rolling of the scroll, i.e., horizontal for a hanging scroll and vertical for a handscroll. i'd never thought of that, and i'm guessing that you hadn't either until recently. at any rate, it is both insightful and logical, but does the evidence bear this out? not being in a museum, i can only look at books, which is highly unsatisfactory, for all the obvious reasons: big paintings/little photographs; damaged paintings/careful repairs. even so, if i pull a few books off of the shelves and look at presumably-song paintings, i see some notable degree of exception to the otherwise logical principle. (i'm not talking about your "brickwork pattern"/simultaneous vertical-horizontal yet – i'll get there.) examples of vertical scrolls with vertical damage (all on silk, of course) : fan kuan, guo xi, li tang 1124, wen tong's s-shaped bamboo, cui bo, cat and peonies; and on into the yuan, khubilai khan hunting, and so forth. it's just not that uncommon. but i understand that's not quite what you're talking about. (and believe me/excuse me, i'm capable of misunderstanding and misconstruing your argument; but if i am, some others will be as well. apologies.) you are describing a more complicated pattern, and perhaps a closer look at some of these would reveal that full pattern but probably not; the wen tong seems to come closest. but i can name one other painting which you accept as authentic song that seems to me to fit exactly what you are talking about: the metropolitan's "li gonglin" xiaojing tu. you already know what i think about that work. anyhow, even in reproduction i think you can see this clearly: check out barnhart, p.l 5, among others. (again, i may be misunderstanding you or misreading, but i think not. you'll let me know.)

so, assume now that your are right about this distressing being abnormal and artificial. and accept that both riverbank and the "li gonglin" are characterized by it. does this make either or both of them a modern forgery? by zhang daqian? are there no other possibilities that need to be dismissed? i'm no materials expert. (i translated the yu feian book because what i didn't know, not because of what i did.) i can only imagine a few of the questions that others might ask, or a few of them anyhow; and others might come up with better, or at least more questions than i could. presuming (as you do) that this wasn't done by zhang daqian but by someone else (at his command, you would say, a Japanese mounter perhaps), how do you know that this was an intentional undertaking indicative of a forger's intent? isn't there some circularity in your reasoning? that is, all of the paintings become the product of zhang daqian because of their common pattern of distress and the pattern of distress becomes phony because they are all by zhang daqian. let's say i'm right about the xiaojing tu, of which zhang was not part of the chain of transmission but his friend c.c. wang was (c.c. inscription dated 甲辰, 1964 and a gap in documented transmission before that dating back to 1880).  let's say zhang daqian saw the work, who knows when, perhaps 1952 (i'm making it up, of course) and said to himself, here's the distress pattern to get my mounter to imitate. or, let' say that zhang came by riverbank rightfully, as he claimed, and said to himself, here is the distress pattern to get my mounter to imitate when he helps me perpetrate my forgeries (the british museum Juran, for example). if i were a diehard holdout against your views, stubborn and committed and somewhat closed-minded but bound to defend my views and live by the ultimate logic of the matter, this is what i would throw back at you: prove to me that this could not have been the case. otherwise, demonstrate zhang daqian's authorship of the xiaojing tu. oh yes, one more painting that seems (to my untrained eye) to fit this distress pattern: the archaeologically excavated Karakhoto fragment (datable 1032-1226).

sherlock holmes always steps into a situation where lestrade thinks he solved the dilemma, and sherlock always demands alternatives, always finds the second or third way of thinking about things. i'm no sherlock, but i always suspect there are alternatives yet to be imagined and explored. to be guarded against: "believing is seeing." i have a bumper sticker hung up where my kids can see it: "don't believe everything you think." i'm not just trying to be contrarian, but i don't think we're there yet on this one. no way you could convince me this is a dong yuan. (i'm not even sure why his name is brought into it.) but even if it was a 20th-century painting, and that's a stretch still, it seems to me a stretch to attach it specifically to zhang daqian, whose other landscape forgeries are all so tacky compared to this one. so on to the style question.

the comparison of trees doesn't say to me what it does to you. they may share the same model but not the same hand. and if zhang daqian owned riverbank in all honesty, why wouldn't he have used it as a model. that would only be natural. fu shen says he did not, but maybe that is not entirely so. i think i can put my finger on two points where we differ: you argue for a higher standard of accurate, naturalistic depiction in all song painting than i would. you combine this with a conviction (as in your du jin argument) that the original tends to be more accurate in depiction than the copy (it seems to me this could go either way; a copyist can make mistakes or he can clean up a mess out of fear that jim cahill will find his work is a forgery). i think we can point to many examples of confused depiction in song painting: spatially mixed up, spongy, whatever. i demonstrated some of this in my own riverbank symposium talk / "issues in connoisseurship" essay, including details in riverbank that even you did not point out and also in the excavated liaoning scroll (the same problem there that you point out about the placement of the riverbank scholar's lodge) and in the guo xi, as well as (in my talk, which didn't make it into my written essay) the bizang chuan. do you not set too high a standard for the song? besides, we have so little that remains of song painting, we hardly know what diversity must have existed regionally and outside the ranks of those we think we know today as having set the standards back then. (e.g., the palace museum's juran, xiao yi obtains the orchid pavilion manuscript, both artist and title not to be believed: the guy has no clue as to how to paint a horse or a bridge, yet it could be an old painting.) i don't think the water in riverbank is all that hot, but so what? why should it be, if we don't insist on this being a masterpiece of the period? i do not find it upsetting, nor do i find it "unnatural." in seattle, i often crossed the floating bridge to bellevue and back and frequently observed that the water looked very much like this: blown by a hard wind making its way up from the south of lake washington, it took a highly uniform pattern of small waves just like this on the south side of the bridge, while on the north side of the bridge, which broke the wind pattern, it flattened out completely for hundreds of yards until farther north it gradually picked up the same pattern again. the water in the zhao gan is so varied in its flow around the shore and rocks precisely because it is not under such a force. and clearly, there is a storm pattern suggested in riverbank, so to me this is not the weakness that sherman lee tried to characterize it as being. i do not find this water at all comparable to that in the ho kungshang publication that you have recently illustrated online; likewise the trees. neither do i find the riverbank's turning of a walkway into a riverway disturbing. i have seen that happen in many a painting, both chinese and western. (example: domenico ghirlandaio's famous grandfather and grandson, where i suspect it has some "path of life" significance; example closer to home: the first section of li gonglin's composition longmian shanju tu, berenson coll.) conversely, among the striking weaknesses of the painting, the disappearing mountain tops. but where else in a zhang daqian forgery do we find this? in his modern splashed ink style, sure. but in his forgeries and even his loose "studies" of the past, he wouldn't do this, and why would he if he were trying to fake us out? surely he knows how to finish off a mountain peak in song style.  to me, this feature in isolation suggests just the opposite, that it is not a modern forgery, at least not by any modern forger with half a brain. as for the figures in riverbank, i don't find the main figures particularly "dramatic," as you suggest. no more than those in many a song figures-in-landscape painting (the Nelson "Li Cheng"; the Freer "Guo Xi"; etc). words become a problem: sure they're "dramatic" if you expect "no drama," but that's why we use dual projection – words have little meaning except as calibrated by chosen examples.

so Jim, i am surely disappointing you here. you thought i was so sensible and all, that surely i could be persuaded. but please note: i am not saying you are wrong, and it is not that i could not possibly be persuaded. but i am very much an agnostic, and it would take a lot for me to feel like anyone has pinned this painting down to any given century, 10th, 11th, 14th, whatever, and i don't find that particularly disturbing or that it says anything bad about our field of study. furthermore, i don't hesitate to say that you are far ahead of me in connoisseurship, and so too are many others whose updated responses i would very much like to hear. i admire greatly your challenge not just to the metropolitan-princeton "in-crowd" but to us all, plus all the enormous effort you have put into thinking about this. you set a high personal standard and i hope you will not be discouraged by any of us, whether we speak up or because we sit still. and still, i hope you will allow some leeway for those of us who think hard about this but think otherwise.

jerome

ps. if you ever wish to put this online for folks to think about open-mindedly, as you have done with a few other items lately, here is my permission to do so.

Dear Jerome,

At the end of your long latest response you suggest that we might put the whole correspondence online “for folks to think about open-mindedly,” and you give your permission. I certainly agree, and will do that. You are welcome to respond to this message of mine, and maybe that will be a good time to end it--I don’t think we are getting anywhere, into new areas of agreement & disagreement.

You wonder near the beginning whether I will be disappointed with your response--well, let’s say that I did have some hope that if I presented enough examples of distinctive features to be seen in Riverbank that are to be found in Zhang Daqian’s fakes but not in any genuinely old paintings, that might sway you. But you continue to stay in the “referee” role that you adopted during the 1999 Symposium, and adamantly decline to accept what seems me to be overwhelming evidence. (I think I will insert here, as Fig. 1, the photo of you in your striped referee shirt giving that talk.) Together with a preposterous “provenance” that can be shown to have been concocted (as I did in my long paper back then), the new visual proofs that I’ve brought together--or that have been supplied by a supporter--should be enough to let the painting join van Meegeren’s “Supper At Emmaus” among the distinguished examples of high-level fakery that the history of art offers. But alas, they don’t seem to.

It appears to me that you are re-stating my arguments in a way that pulls away their NO WAY OUT character, and then trying to find a way out. Your long paragraph on the “distressing of the silk” is an example. If I had been writing and talking only about old paintings on silk with both horizontal and vertical cracking, yes, I could find a lot of them too. But in my Addendum B Part 2 I showed something much more specific, and damning: the visually distinctive “brickwork pattern” seen at scattered places on the surfaces of Zhang’s fakes on silk, on all the examples I show. And then there it is, unmistakably, on Riverbank. And if you try to find that distinctive visual feature in genuinely old paintings, I don’t think you will succeed. Others will try also, for sure, and will proclaim that they have found old examples, but I don’t believe that their finds will bear up under close scrutiny. (When I get back to Vancouver I’ll look at my images from the Li Gonglin Xiaojing tu scroll and see whether my ‘brickwork pattern” really appears there, as you suggest. I’ve never thought of including that painting among my list of Zhang fakes.)

You write about the mountaintop that disappears into mist: “the disappearing mountain tops. but where else in a zhang daqian forgery do we find this? in his modern splashed ink style, sure. but in his forgeries and even his loose "studies" of the past, he wouldn't do this, and why would he if he were trying to fake us out? surely he knows how to finish off a mountain peak in song style.” But the truth is that it is to be seen in another of Zhang’s forgeries, the “Juran” landscape formerly owned by J.D.  Chen.  I pointed this out in my old lecture on Zhang’s fakes, which is on my website as:

CLP 16: 1991 "Chang Ta-ch'ien's Forgeries of Old Master Paintings." Symposium, Sackler Museum, D.C

I think you were present, certainly Wen Fong and Dick Barnhart were. Here are two excerpts from this old lecture-article. (The (S,S) marks are for slides I  was showing.) The first excerpt is from around the middle of the lecture, the second from near the end:

“(S,S) The two large, impressive paintings purportedly by Tung Yüan and Chü-jan that were among the treasures of the Hong Kong collector J. D. Chen are both based on identifiable prototypes. . . . (Notice, by the way, how the mountaintop in the Chu-jan forgery disappears entirely, not through damage but simply through not being there; we will note the same curious feature later in what I believe to be another of Chang's creations.) 

“(--S) All the elements I have been trying to define as characteristic of Chang's style come together in this much-praised work [Riverbank], ascribed to Tung Yüan and bearing his "signature". The composition is paralleled more closely in Chang's paintings (such as the two we have just seen) than in anything genuinely archaic, and is filled with spatially and formally unintelligible passages, which time does not permit me to point out individually. I have used the picture as a visual test for students in my early Chinese painting courses; the sharp-eyed ones point out, for instance, that what begins as a winding river in the distance turns imperceptibly into a road with figures walking on it. (I received for the first time a readable photograph of this painting from its owner, someone I respect highly, just as I was preparing the doctoral exams for Richard Vinograd, and gave it to him as a part of his connoisseurship exam; with no prior acquaintance with the painting, he analyzed it skilfully, coming, I think, to the right conclusion, that it could not be a genuinely old picture.)

“(S--) At the bottom, the same moody scholar leans on the balustrade of his porch and gazes out over the water. Here, too, he is surrounded by the kind of representational incoherence we saw in others of Chang's fabrications: spongy earth-masses of no plausible plastic form that blur ambiguously into trees and houses; a radical failure to attend to keeping one pictorial element distinct from another. The fact that the distant mountain disappears entirely at the top, as it does in the "Chü-jan" forgery shown earlier, cannot be explained as damage, or mildew, or mist; it simply isn't there. Chang, secure in his assumedly unfathomable murkiness of darkened silk, did not paint it in. (I hear a chorus of protest: Chinese artists were not concerned with such descriptive niceties of hsing-ssu or form-likeness. Wrong, I reply, they were; anyone arguing otherwise must explain why no comparable incoherence or form-faking can be found in reliably old Chinese paintings.)”

Back to you, Jerome: If you can look at the juxtaposition of passages of trees from Zhang’s old teaching pictures with those in Riverbank, in the composite image that John Rohrer sent me (reproduced with the previous blog), and not take those to be obviously done by a single hand, then  we really are seeing with  different eyes. Kohara-san and Sherman Lee, and others as documented in my other video (Addendum A Part 2), saw what I see--how can we two be so far apart? (I have introduced Sherman here mainly so to put on the photo of him,  Mike Hearn, and myself seated on the  stage at the Symposium as Fig.  2.)

My frustration, as you can guess, is that I can go on writing blogs and missives like this one endlessly, and those of our colleagues who choose to ignore them can go on doing so forever.  My frustration is like the one I describe in one of my videos, which I would feel when C. C. Wang would ask  me, standing in front of Riverbank  with me,  to explain to  him why  it’s not a great old painting. (See Fig. 3,  C. C. Wang speaking up at the Symposium, through his daughter Yien-koo.) Short of sitting him down in a lecture room and showing him slides--or, today, in front of a computer and calling up the images--there was no way I could convey to him the compelling--even, now, decisive--visual evidence for what I know to be  true. And that wasn’t going to happen. Nor can I, now, sit my learned colleagues  down in a lecture hall and show them with slides all the new evidence,  which I believe to  be overwhelming. I can only hope that enough of them will look at the new stuff of their own accord, and that some of them will say, even publicly: Yes, he’s right, the  evidence is too clear and abundant for us to continue to  ignore it.

  

Your long response is useful, then, in giving me clues to how a lot of our colleagues are going to respond--if they do so at all. I expect that some of them will choose that passive kind of response, or lack of it: “Let’s just pretend he isn’t there, and maybe he will go away.” I will go away, but (I hope) not before I see to it that Riverbank joins the great corpus of recognized Zhang Daqian fakes, and the whole affair becomes as public and familiar as the van Meegeren/Vermeer series of forgeries. My old friend Mr. Zhang, who was much more versatile and altogether a better painter than van Meegeren--besides being far more likeable as a person--deserves nothing less.

Yours, Jim

(Sent later on same day:)

dear jim,

just in case i am wrong, here is how i can explain it

jerome

Dear Bob,

We haven’t been in touch for a while. Did I read somewhere that you are retired, or close to it? Anyway--I’m in Berkeley at the moment--I still go back & forth between here and Vancouver, where I continue to produce video-lectures, the  main project of my later years. I included you among the twenty-or-so people who got advance notice of the additions at the end (Addenda A&B, Part 2 of each) about Riverbank. The first of these, about the famous symposium & how it was  “stacked” etc., I put together from a file of old correspondence,  including  several letters to &  from you, during the  time I was preparing my paper for that--I hope you didn’t mind being mentioned & quoted (positively, of course.)

My old friend Carl Nagin, the former journalist who first broke the Riverbank story with a short New Yorker piece, as you remember, was here this afternoon, and I was talking about your study of old painting silks (which  I’ve been urging you to publish  for years, without success.) And he asked what your response might be to the new revelations about the silk on which Zhang Daqian’s fakes were painted, how it was “aged” (I assume by someone in Japan). I said I didn’t know, but I would write you. Have you had time to look at the “Riverbank: A Closer Look” video, into which I inserted at the last minute the series of images with commentary about my discovery: that all of Zhang’s forgeries on silk (all I have in good enough images to tell) have passages of this “brickwork” pattern scattered over them--including Riverbank--while it’s not to be found on any genuinely old paintings. That, at least, is what I argue, and I’ve looked through lots of old painting details. But Carl very sensibly would like to hear the opinion of the  real expert on old Chinese painting silks, yourself. When you have time and if you are interested (as I hope you are) I hope you will look at this video and let us know what you think. Any comments at all, or any more about Zhang’s fakes on silk, will be very welcome. He is writing an article for publication on these new revelations, and  wants to gather opinions from really  knowledgeable and engaged  people.

All the best, Jim

Back to Jerome

Dear Jerome,

At the end of your long latest response you suggest that we might put the whole correspondence online “for folks to think about open-mindedly,” and you give your permission. I certainly agree, and will do that. You are welcome to respond to this message of mine, and maybe that will be a good time to end it--I don’t think we are getting anywhere, into new areas of agreement & disagreement.

You wonder near the beginning whether I will be disappointed with your response--well, let’s say that I did have some hope that if I presented enough examples of distinctive features to be seen in Riverbank that are to be found in Zhang Daqian’s fakes but not in any genuinely old paintings, that might sway you. But you continue to stay in the “referee” role that you adopted during the 1999 Symposium, and adamantly decline to accept what seems me to be overwhelming evidence. (I think I will insert here, as Fig. 1, the photo of you in your striped referee shirt giving that talk.) Together with a preposterous “provenance” that can be shown to have been concocted (as I did in my long paper back then), the new visual proofs that I’ve brought together--or that have been supplied by a supporter--should be enough to let the painting join van Meegeren’s “Supper At Emmaus” among the distinguished examples of high-level fakery that the history of art offers. But alas, they don’t seem to.

It appears to me that you are re-stating my arguments in a way that pulls away their NO WAY OUT character, and then trying to find a way out. Your long paragraph on the “distressing of the silk” is an example. If I had been writing and talking only about old paintings on silk with both horizontal and vertical cracking, yes, I could find a lot of them too. But in my Addendum B Part 2 I showed something much more specific, and damning: the visually distinctive “brickwork pattern” seen at scattered places on the surfaces of Zhang’s fakes on silk, on all the examples I show. And then there it is, unmistakably, on Riverbank. And if you try to find that distinctive visual feature in genuinely old paintings, I don’t think you will succeed. Others will try also, for sure, and will proclaim that they have found old examples, but I don’t believe that their finds will bear up under close scrutiny. (When I get back to Vancouver I’ll look at my images from the Li Gonglin Xiaojing tu scroll and see whether my ‘brickwork pattern” really appears there, as you suggest. I’ve never thought of including that painting among my list of Zhang fakes.)

You write about the mountaintop that disappears into mist: “the disappearing mountain tops. but where else in a zhang daqian forgery do we find this? in his modern splashed ink style, sure. but in his forgeries and even his loose "studies" of the past, he wouldn't do this, and why would he if he were trying to fake us out? surely he knows how to finish off a mountain peak in song style.” But the truth is that it is to be seen in another of Zhang’s forgeries, the “Juran” landscape formerly owned by J.D.  Chen.  I pointed this out in my old lecture on Zhang’s fakes, which is on my website as:

CLP 16: 1991 "Chang Ta-ch'ien's Forgeries of Old Master Paintings." Symposium, Sackler Museum, D.C

I think you were present, certainly Wen Fong and Dick Barnhart were. Here are two excerpts from this old lecture-article. (The (S,S) marks are for slides I  was showing.) The first excerpt is from around the middle of the lecture, the second from near the end:

“(S,S) The two large, impressive paintings purportedly by Tung Yüan and Chü-jan that were among the treasures of the Hong Kong collector J. D. Chen are both based on identifiable prototypes. . . . (Notice, by the way, how the mountaintop in the Chu-jan forgery disappears entirely, not through damage but simply through not being there; we will note the same curious feature later in what I believe to be another of Chang's creations.) 

“(--S) All the elements I have been trying to define as characteristic of Chang's style come together in this much-praised work [Riverbank], ascribed to Tung Yüan and bearing his "signature". The composition is paralleled more closely in Chang's paintings (such as the two we have just seen) than in anything genuinely archaic, and is filled with spatially and formally unintelligible passages, which time does not permit me to point out individually. I have used the picture as a visual test for students in my early Chinese painting courses; the sharp-eyed ones point out, for instance, that what begins as a winding river in the distance turns imperceptibly into a road with figures walking on it. (I received for the first time a readable photograph of this painting from its owner, someone I respect highly, just as I was preparing the doctoral exams for Richard Vinograd, and gave it to him as a part of his connoisseurship exam; with no prior acquaintance with the painting, he analyzed it skilfully, coming, I think, to the right conclusion, that it could not be a genuinely old picture.)

“(S--) At the bottom, the same moody scholar leans on the balustrade of his porch and gazes out over the water. Here, too, he is surrounded by the kind of representational incoherence we saw in others of Chang's fabrications: spongy earth-masses of no plausible plastic form that blur ambiguously into trees and houses; a radical failure to attend to keeping one pictorial element distinct from another. The fact that the distant mountain disappears entirely at the top, as it does in the "Chü-jan" forgery shown earlier, cannot be explained as damage, or mildew, or mist; it simply isn't there. Chang, secure in his assumedly unfathomable murkiness of darkened silk, did not paint it in. (I hear a chorus of protest: Chinese artists were not concerned with such descriptive niceties of hsing-ssu or form-likeness. Wrong, I reply, they were; anyone arguing otherwise must explain why no comparable incoherence or form-faking can be found in reliably old Chinese paintings.)”

Back to you, Jerome: If you can look at the juxtaposition of passages of trees from Zhang’s old teaching pictures with those in Riverbank, in the composite image that John Rohrer sent me (reproduced with the previous blog), and not take those to be obviously done by a single hand, then  we really are seeing with  different eyes. Kohara-san and Sherman Lee, and others as documented in my other video (Addendum A Part 2), saw what I see--how can we two be so far apart? (I have introduced Sherman here mainly so to put on the photo of him,  Mike Hearn, and myself seated on the  stage at the Symposium as Fig.  2.)

My frustration, as you can guess, is that I can go on writing blogs and missives like this one endlessly, and those of our colleagues who choose to ignore them can go on doing so forever.  My frustration is like the one I describe in one of my videos, which I would feel when C. C. Wang would ask  me, standing in front of Riverbank  with me,  to explain to  him why  it’s not a great old painting. (See Fig. 3,  C. C. Wang speaking up at the Symposium, through his daughter Yien-koo.) Short of sitting him down in a lecture room and showing him slides--or, today, in front of a computer and calling up the images--there was no way I could convey to him the compelling--even, now, decisive--visual evidence for what I know to be  true. And that wasn’t going to happen. Nor can I, now, sit my learned colleagues  down in a lecture hall and show them with slides all the new evidence,  which I believe to  be overwhelming. I can only hope that enough of them will look at the new stuff of their own accord, and that some of them will say, even publicly: Yes, he’s right, the  evidence is too clear and abundant for us to continue to  ignore it.  

Your long response is useful, then, in giving me clues to how a lot of our colleagues are going to respond--if they do so at all. I expect that some of them will choose that passive kind of response, or lack of it: “Let’s just pretend he isn’t there, and maybe he will go away.” I will go away, but (I hope) not before I see to it that Riverbank joins the great corpus of recognized Zhang Daqian fakes, and the whole affair becomes as public and familiar as the van Meegeren/Vermeer series of forgeries. My old friend Mr. Zhang, who was much more versatile and altogether a better painter than van Meegeren--besides being far more likeable as a person--deserves nothing less.

Yours, Jim

Jerome’s Last

dear jim,

indeed, we do see things differently, and there's a whole lot more variation out there, to stand in the way of the consensus you are hoping for. but i agree that you and i have gone far enough with this one case and you've heard more than enough from me about it over the years. you ought to be hearing from others instead, but i can't help with that. besides, like a newspaper focusing on bad news, this obscures the far more frequent times when we've been in agreement and when i've been grateful to have your support. in the meantime, i'll check out the j.d. chen paintings you mentioned (yes, i was at that symposium) and you can let me know if you think the xiaojing tu matches your "brickwork pattern."

all the best,

jerome 

Jerome 2

Latest  exchange:

Jim,

OK, I'm back on email. This morning, I had a half-hour talk with Freda, who is briefly at Princeton. I don't know if she is one of your designated 20 recipients or not and therefore whether or not she has seen you Addendum 2B. So I mentioned the matter in an indirect way, and not surprisingly, she commented that it was the technical studies that Mike Hearn had done of the materials which convinced her of the "earliness" (Song? Yuan?) of the painting. It is, of course, possible that this is a new painting on old, newly distressed silk. But her comment reinforces my sense that rather than trying to convince those of us who can't see the difference between 10th and 20th century in style that you do in the painting and don't know much about materials that you should try to convince the few who do know about materials to take your latest observations (still unseen by me; sorry!) into account with an open mind and see how they effect their sense of the overall equation. I can tell that your patience has pretty much run out, but all I can counsel is "patience." Let those who are knowledgable accept or, with the additional time it would take, try to refute your most recent claim and see what that comes to. I think that most of us would look on with genuine interest - I am not invested in any particular outcome but obviously find all of this enormously instructive, and I would like to continue learning from this case. Such a shame that John Winter is lost to us: there was a deeply knowledgable and eminently fair-minded player who could be a far better referee of the matter than I was. Is there no such other person around today?

Jerome

Dear Jerome,

Thanks for continuing to be engaged & advising me--this is all very helpful.

Yes, citing Mike’s study of the silk etc. is one way out. WF did that in his paper for the symposium, saying that it proved that Riverbank couldn’t possibly be a modern forgery by Chang Daqian. I cited this in my paper, and then the long footnote in his old “Forgeries” article telling how the Bodhisattva that is his main example there of Chang’s fakes was put through an exhaustive technical examination--the silk that is--at the Kyoto Nat’l Museum, and came through so positively that they were writing a scholarly article on it as a fine and reliable example of Tang-period silk--until they learned the truth. And WF concluded that we can’t trust technical exams, need to use our eyes; and I said that between the 1957 WF and the 1999 one, I would choose to believe the early one. And I still feel that way--he was right back then. The one person I know who has really made a serious study of the silk  on which old Chinese paintings are done,  Bob Mowry (he  hasn’t published on this, although I’ve urged him to  for  years) wrote me--I cite this in my Addendum 1B and show his letter as I remember--wrote that even if the silk of Riverbank were really old, he wouldn’t accept it as an old painting. Likewise their clever trick of borrowing the BM “Juran” to hang beside it, and saying: Look, they don’t look  alike! Therefore…

So…

Best, Jim

dear jim,

yesterday i went down to d.c. to see the jakuchu exhibition from shokokuji. super stuff. used to take students down to joe price's place to see his jakuchus, but i've waited a long time to see this fabulous batch. it's a monster success for the national gallery. once there, i immediately ran into mike hearn. it turns out, he's saving the "palace banquet" painting for his own garden paintings exhibition coming up, so that's why it's not going to shanghai.

john rosenfield accepted the freer medal last night, but they never announced this event so lots of us who were down there yesterday had train reservations that left too soon for us to attend. really stupid of them and what a shame for many of us.

tonight, i'm interviewing gu wenda onstage. this coming monday, tuesday, thursday we're hosting three talks by claudia brown on qianlong projects: southern tours and topographic paintings; collecting and the shiqu baoji; art and he siku quanshu project. that's the pace of my "sabbatical." this weekend, i'll try to watch your new riverbank lecture and give you my qualified feedback.

best, jerome 

Dear John,

I just heard the news, and am writing belatedly to congratulate you, no. 12 to no. 13.  (Today’s Friday the 13^th; but I was born on one so it’s lucky for me.) Definitely a fully deserved, if anything belated, honor for a great scholar-teacher. I look forward to reading your acceptance talk. How I remember the occasions when we were together, and wish we could have been for this one--but I’m not traveling any more. Barely to Berkeley, where I am now. So, warmest wishes and congratulations, old old friend and very  distinguished one,  as now recognized. You join--who--Yashiro, Tanaka Ichimatsu, Soper and Lee who did both China & Japan. So only third, really, for Japanese art. It’s been a sparsely populated field,  in which you have towered high.

Best, Jim

Wednesday the 18^th? Wrote Jerome to send him most of John Rohrer letter, and  my response.

Dear Jim,

I did not get to your Add 2B last weekend as hoped. Many the reasons: 3 Chicago talks coming up, lots of grad student stuff as the semester rolls to a close. Perhaps the coming weekend. But I should be low on your target list, as a mild-mannered academic who believes that stylistic analysis is just a part of true connoisseurship (you've gone the extra distance, with your long museum background; I haven't). Besides that, I am not intellectually committed to my post-post-connoisseurship, which embraces not coming to conclusions except in unusual cases (OK, this could be unusual). Anyhow, I think that instead of targeting know-nothings like myself (I don't know who else is on your list of 20), you should focus on the few at the "top" who really understand not just style but materials. What a loss when John Winter passed. But I understand that someone with lots of materials know-how is there at the Freer conservation lab -- don't know a name but I briefly asked Steve Allee about their staffing. And Fu Shen, who knows Zhang's life in forgery so well but didn't think this could be by him. (I know that Lucy Lo, who knew Zhang well and watched him work many times also doubts he could have done this.) Target Fu Shen, target Mike Hearn, and whoever it was at the Met who did the materials studies that Mike published. You have more to gain by each one of them than by 5 or 10 of me. Well, hopefully this weekend will buy me some more free time. If I get to listen, I could probably be of greater service to you by lawyer-like saying, here are the lingering weaknesses in your argument (my dear siblings are lawyers, and we've always benefitted by trying to disagree even when we agree).

Jerome

Dear Jim,

I hope to get around to all this today. But I cannot find your latest blog, the one you mention with illustrations of trees. Please resend. Thanks,

Jerome

Dear Jerome,

Go to my website jamescahill.info. At the left is a p;icture and a  title:  More About Old Mr. Zhang. .. Down below that is written: Read more. Click on that and the whole  thing will  appear. I can’t send it,  or  don’t  know how, with the  pictures in place, and they matter.

Thanks as always for taking time for me and my  fusses.

Best, Jim

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