Chang Dai-chien

Biography

In 1957 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired a tenth-century landscape attributed to Guan Tong, a master of the Five Dynasties period. It later emerged that the scroll had been painted by a living artist, Chang Dai-chien, and that it was one of his most audacious forgeries.

Better to say this at once, so as to talk about painting from here on.

Chang Dai-chien was born on 10 May 1899 in Neijiang, in Sichuan province, into a poor family in which, nonetheless, everyone drew and handled a brush; he took up calligraphy in early childhood, imitating his elder brother Zhang Shanzi, later a well-known painter. He received his first commission at twelve: a travelling fortune-teller asked the boy to paint her a new set of divining cards. At seventeen, on his way home from boarding school in Chongqing, he fell into the hands of bandits; the chief ordered him to write a ransom letter to his family, but was so taken with the prisoner's brushwork that he made him his secretary, and for three months and more Chang read in the camp the poetry looted from raided houses. In 1917 he went to Kyoto to learn textile dyeing, and in 1919 returned to Shanghai, where in the early 1920s he studied with Zeng Xi and Li Ruiqing; for a time he entered a Buddhist monastery, but was soon disillusioned and went back to the brush. In 1924 his brother took him to a literary salon, where he made an impression at his first appearance, and in the mid-1920s his first exhibition, of a hundred works, was held in Shanghai.

In the late 1920s and the 1930s he lived in Beijing, where he was friends with Qi Baishi and with Pu Xinyu, with whom he painted and wrote calligraphy jointly; it was then that the saying arose, “Chang in the south, Pu in the north”. He worked from a studio in the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou. In 1933, at the Paris exhibition of modern Chinese painting organised by Xu Beihong, the French government bought his “Golden Lotus”; in 1935 the same Xu Beihong invited him to be a professor in the art department of the National Central University in Nanjing, a portfolio of his work was published in Shanghai that year, and in 1936 he had a solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. In the thirties he began collecting old paintings and opened a school of his own.

In the early 1940s Chang Dai-chien led a group of artists to Dunhuang, to the Mogao and Yulin caves, to copy the Buddhist wall paintings; the governor of Qinghai, Ma Bufang, sent him to Kumbum monastery to find Tibetan helpers. To reach the lower layers of the multilayered murals in Caves 108, 130 and 454 he removed and damaged the upper ones, and the story is held against him to this day. In 1943 he exhibited his copies and supported the founding of the Dunhuang Art Institute, forerunner of today's Dunhuang Academy. In 1945 his work was included in a UNESCO touring exhibition shown in Paris, London, Prague and Geneva.

In 1949 he left China.

What followed was a life on three continents: from 1952 Mendoza in Argentina, from 1954 the outskirts of São Paulo, from 1967 Carmel on the California coast, where a crowd of a thousand came to the opening of his very first exhibition, at Stanford, and where he named his house “Barely Habitable”. He wore the long robe and beard of a scholar of the old school and kept a pet gibbon. In 1956, in Nice, he met Picasso; the meeting was described as a summit of the two leading masters of East and West, and they exchanged paintings. As the story goes, Picasso asked his guest to criticise his attempts in the Chinese manner, and Chang replied that he simply did not have the right brushes; ten years later he sent him a gift of two brushes made from the hair of two and a half thousand three-year-old cows. In the late 1950s, as his eyesight began to fail him, he developed his “splashed colour” manner, pocai: pools of ink and mineral pigment flung onto the paper, with a few precise strokes on top that turn the stains into mountains and clouds. How much of this is Picasso and how much Dunhuang, I would not venture to check. In the 1970s he taught the painter Minol Araki. In 1978 he settled in Taipei, where he died on 2 April 1983.

Now, the forgeries. Chang studied paper, ink, brushes, pigments, seals and seal paste in such detail that he sometimes described them in his own inscriptions on scrolls; he aged paper with a hairdryer, applied the seals of former “owners” from his collection, and his friend Pu Ru, a relative of the last emperor, added colophons attesting to a palace provenance. He often painted pictures from descriptions of lost works in old catalogues, so that the forgery came with a ready-made history. The art historian James Cahill held that “The Riverbank”, a masterpiece of the Southern Tang period in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was most likely his hand too. Curators are still advised to ask one question of doubtful Chinese scrolls, especially of flowers and birds: could this be by Chang Dai-chien?