Chang Dai-chien or Zhang Daqian (May 10, 1899 – April 2, 1983) was one of the best-known and most prodigious Chinese artists of the twentieth century. Originally known as a guohua (traditionalist) painter, by the 1960s he was also renowned as a modern impressionist and expressionist painter. Chang is regarded as one of the most gifted master forgers of the twentieth century. Born in a family of artists in Neijiang, Sichuan, China, he studied textile dyeing techniques in Kyoto, Japan and returned to establish a successful career selling his paintings in Shanghai. The then-governor of Qinghai, Ma Bufang, sent Chang to Skubum to seek helpers for analyzing and copying Dunhuangs Buddhist art. Due to the political climate of China in 1949, he left the country and resided in various places such as Mendoza, Argentina, São Paulo and Mogi das Cruzes, Brazil, and then to Carmel, California, before finally in 1978 settling in Taipei, Taiwan. A meeting between Chang and Picasso in Nice, France in 1956 was viewed as a summit between the preeminent masters of Eastern and Western art. The two men exchanged paintings at this meeting Changs early professional painting was primarily in Shanghai. In the late 1920s he moved to Beijing where he collaborated with Pu Xinyu. In the 1930s he worked out of a studio on the grounds of Wangshi Yuan in Suzhou. In 1940 he led a group of artists in copying the Buddhist wall paintings in the caves of Mogao and Yulin. In the late 1950s, his deteriorating eyesight led him to develop his splashed color, or pocai, style Changs forgeries are difficult to detect for many reasons. First, his ability to mimic the great Chinese masters: So prodigious was his virtuosity within the medium of Chinese ink and colour that it seemed he could paint anything. His output spanned a huge range, from archaising works based on the early masters of Chinese painting to the innovations of his late works which connect with the language of Western abstract art. Second, he paid scrupulous attention to the materials he used. He studied paper, ink, brushes, pigments, seals, seal paste, and scroll mountings in exacting detail. When he wrote an inscription on a painting, he sometimes included a postscript describing the type of paper, the age and the origin of the ink, or the provenance of the pigments he had used. Third, he often forged paintings based on descriptions in catalogues of lost paintings; his forgeries came with ready-made provenance. Changs forgeries have been purchased as original paintings by several major art museums in the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Of particular interest is a master forgery acquired by the Museum in 1957 as an authentic work of the tenth century. The painting, which was allegedly a landscape by the Five Dynasties period master Guan Tong, is one of Zhang’s most ambitious forgeries and serves to illustrate both his skill and his audacity. James Cahill, professor emeritus of Chinese art at the University of California, Berkeley, has claimed that the painting The Riverbank, a masterpiece from the Southern Tang Dynasty, held by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, is likely another Chang Dai-chien forgery. Museum curators are cautioned to examine Chinese paintings of questionable origins, especially those from the bird and flower genre with the query, Could this be by Chang Dai-chien?Joseph Chang, curator of Chinese art at the Sackler Museum, suggests that many notable collections of Chinese art contains a forgery by the master painter https://google/search?q=Zhang+Daqian+(%E5%BC%B5%E5%A4%A7%E5%8D%83,+1899-1983)&rlz=1T4MXGB_enUS563US563&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=PQL4U77JO8iXyASohoHYBQ&ved=0CC4QsAQ&biw=1301&bih=589
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 02:58:19 +0000
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