Week 10: The forger as artist

Zhang Daqian, who forged well enough to fool the field he later joined, and what that does to the ethics of the fake.

10 May 2027

Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) is the case that unsettles everything taught so far. A celebrated painter in his own right, he was also, by his own cheerful admission, one of the most successful forgers of the twentieth century. A forged Bada Shanren album he made — its seals quietly swapped from an obscure calligrapher’s to one rumoured to be Bada’s own brother, to raise its appeal to collectors — still sits in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, catalogued today as his own work. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was fooled by two different Zhang fakes entirely, sold to it as a tenth-century Guan Tong and an anonymous sixth-century painting; the museum’s own 2007 retrospective of his career, unembarrassed, was titled Zhang Daqian: Painter, Collector, Forger. He didn’t hide any of it. At a 1967 University of Michigan exhibition of Shitao’s work, he is reported to have walked the gallery pointing at pieces, saying “I did that. And that.”

Zhang forged as a scholar-connoisseur, not a copyist: his forgeries drew on collections of the very artists he imitated, which he had assembled and studied for years, and the Bada Shanren album shows he sometimes improved on his sources rather than merely reproducing them. If forgery this considered can also be genuine scholarship and genuine craft, the tidy line this course has assumed between “real” and “fake” gets harder to hold, and week 11 is what happens when you stop assuming it.

Outline#

• Zhang Daqian’s career as painter, collector and forger, in that order
• specific forgeries that fooled documented experts and institutions
• what his own attitude to his forgeries — open, unashamed, often proud — implies about forgery as a craft tradition
• the ethical question this leaves open going into week 11