September 3, 1999 - January 9, 2000
Nearly 100 works of Chinese painting collected by the renowned artist/collector C. C. Wang — who has amassed one of the two most important private collections of Chinese old master paintings of the 20th century — will be on view in The Artist as Collector: Masterpieces of Chinese Painting from the C. C. Wang Family Collection. The exhibition features the recent promised gift by the Oscar Tang family of 12 major works acquired from the C. C. Wang Family in 1997, along with some 50 additional paintings and calligraphies acquired from Mr. Wang by the Museum over the last 26 years. These works are augmented by important loans from The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Museum, Princeton University, The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the British Museum, and The C. C. Wang Family.
The exhibition and catalogue are made possible with the support of the Tang Fund.
The Artist as Collector will explore issues of authentication and connoisseurship in Chinese art, and will feature the side-by-side juxtaposition of the renowned 10th-century hanging scroll Riverbank attributed to Dong Yuan (active 930s-960s) — which some scholars claim to be a modern forgery by Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) — with a landscape forgery by Zhang. The comparison of the two works will be facilitated by the inclusion of full-scale digital reproductions that make the brushwork more legible.
The Collection of C.C. Wang
The collection of C. C. Wang is a unique historical achievement, encompassing many masterpieces dispersed from the Qing imperial collection early in this century. The collection is richest in paintings of the 10th through the 14th century, including Northern Song (960-1126) monumental landscapes, figural narratives and elegant album-size paintings sponsored by the Southern Song court (1127-1279), and the full sweep of scholar painting from its inception in the 10th and 11th centuries to its early flowering during the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). Beginning with Riverbank, attributed to the 10th-century patriarch of the scholar-painting landscape tradition, Dong Yuan, the exhibition documents the development of a scholarly landscape style with examples by Song artists Zhao Lingrang (active ca. 1070), Li Gonglin (ca. 1041-1106), and Mi Youren (1074-1151), and continues with multiple examples by virtually every leading landscape painter of the Yuan period, including Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), Wu Zhen (1280-1354), Ni Zan (1306-1374), and Wang Meng (ca. 1308-1385).
The Song courtly tradition is equally well represented, beginning with the anonymous late-10th- to early-11th-century masterpiece Palace Banquet and major narrative works by Li Tang (ca. 1070s-ca. 1150s) and Ma Hezhi (active ca. 1130-ca. 1170), and culminating with 15 keenly observed images of gardens, flowers, and birds by members of the Southern Song Imperial Painting Academy, notably Ma Yuan (active ca. 1190-1225) and his son Ma Lin (ca. 1180 - after 1256).
The continuation of both the scholarly and courtly traditions during the Ming and Qing dynasties is also well represented, including an especially rich concentration of works by individualist and orthodox masters of the 17th century, with masterpieces by the individualists Zhu Da (Bada Shanren, 1626-1705) and Shitao (1642-1707), and by the orthodox painters Wu Li (1632-1717) and Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715).
The Wang collection epitomizes the distinctly Chinese scholarly tradition of combining collecting with creativity. Mr. Wang, an accomplished artist, acquired works of art as a way of learning from the past. To illustrate the important role that collecting has played as a source of inspiration and instruction in Mr. Wang's work, the exhibition concludes with ten of his own paintings and calligraphies dating from 1937 to the present.
More about Riverbank
A special feature of the exhibition is the display of Riverbank, which the Museum considers to be a 10th-century masterpiece by Dong Yuan, but which some scholars have suggested may be a modern fabrication by the renowned painter, connoisseur, and forger Zhang Daqian. In response to this suggeston, the Museum has borrowed a landscape from the British Museum that was formerly attributed to Dong Yuan's follower, Juran (active ca. 960-95) but which is now acknowledged to be a Zhang forgery. These two paintings are displayed side by side to enable the public to draw its own conclusions.
More about C. C. Wang
C. C. Wang (Wang Chi-ch'ien or Wang Jiqian, born 1907) is an accomplished artist who has collected paintings since he began practicing his art more than 70 years ago. For Mr. Wang, collecting has always been a means to an end — a firsthand knowledge of the styles of earlier masters. A resident of New York since 1949, Mr. Wang's collection has long been known to Western scholars and collectors, and today works from his collection are in many important public and university collections in America, including those in Cleveland, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Princeton. By far the largest concentration of paintings from the Wang Family collection — some 60 works — are now at the Metropolitan Museum.
The process whereby so many of Mr. Wang's treasures came to the Metropolitan began in 1973 with the acquisition of 25 Song and Yuan masterpieces from Mr. Wang as a first step toward expanding the Museum's holdings of Asian art. At the time, the Museum lacked a permanent space for the display of Chinese painting. Twenty-five years later, in 1998, the Metropolitan Museum completed its goal of an entire wing devoted to Asian art, a veritable museum within the Museum, incorporating the largest display space for Chinese painting and calligraphy outside Asia. This display space includes the renovated Douglas Dillon Galleries, first opened in 1981, as well as two new display spaces, the C. C. Wang Gallery and the Frances Young Tang Gallery, the latter named in honor of Oscar Tang's late wife, completed in 1997. With the recent promised gift of 12 paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection from Museum Trustee Oscar Tang and his family, the Metropolitan may now present the and calligraphy in the West.
Among the rarest of the masterpieces in the Tang promised gift is Riverbank, one of the largest and earliest monumental landscape paintings known, and widely accepted in China as a rare work of the 10th century. Mr. Wang has long regarded the painting as his most important possession. In 1973, when the Metropolitan Museum acquired a group of 25 Song and Yuan paintings from Mr. Wang, he declined to include Riverbank in the group. At the time, Mr. Wang's son, S. K. Wang, was still living in China and Mr. Wang believed that he might have to relinquish Riverbank to the Chinese government in order to secure his son's emigration. Only after S. K. Wang and his family had moved to the United States did he consider parting with the scroll.
Riverbank's impact on later painting styles is exemplified by a second masterpiece included in the Tang Family promised gift, Simple Retreat by Wang Meng (ca. 1308-1385). Living through a period of political disintegration at the end of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), scholar-artists such as Wang Meng drew inspiration from the visions of the landscape created by Dong Yuan and other 10th-century painters who lived during a similarly chaotic period following the collapse of the Tang dynasty (618-907). But in the late 14th century, the 10th-century ideal of landscape as a place for contemplative self-cultivation seemed unattainable. Although Wang Meng's revival of imagery first created during the chaotic Five Dynasties period served as a thinly veiled allusion to the political turmoil of his own time, the earlier embodiment of the eremetic ideal was undermined by Wang's non-realistic style and pictorial narrative was no longer taken at face value. While the scholar-recluse in Riverbank seems secure from the thunderstorm that swirls around him, the security of the master of Simple Retreat is contradicted by the tumultuous brushwork of his environment. The tempest that blows through Simple Retreat is no longer a rain storm, but the inner tumult of the artist manifested through his expressive brushwork.
In addition to major examples of landscape art, the Tang Family promised gift features several important figure paintings, including the exceedingly rare Palace Banquet by an unknown academy painter of the late 10th or 11th century and a long monochrome narrative by Zhao Cangyun, a late-13th-century survivor of the Mongol conquest. The genre of flower-and-bird painting is represented by Mandarin Ducks and Hollyhocks, a pictorial metaphor of marital happiness by the leading early Ming dynasty academic master, Lü Ji (active late 15th century) and by Two Eagles, a defiant symbol of political resistance by Zhu Da (Bada Shanren, 1626-1705), a descendant of the Ming royal house who lived through the occupation of China by the Manchus.
The Artist as Collector: Masterpieces from the C. C. Wang Family Collection is organized by Maxwell K. Hearn.
Publication
A catalogue, Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection, will be published by the Metropolitan Museum in conjunction with the exhibition. It will feature the 12 promised gifts from the Tang Family and will be organized in three sections: an essay by Wen Fong presenting an in-depth stylistic analysis of Riverbank; a narrative essay by Maxwell K. Hearn examining the 12 promised gifts; and an analysis of the physical and documentary evidence pertaining to Riverbank. The publication will be available in a hardcover edition for $60 in the Museum shops. It will be distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York.
Educational Programs
The full range of opinion about Riverbank's dating and authenticity will be presented on December 11, when the Museum will host a full-day symposium devoted to issues of authentication and connoisseurship. The symposium will include presentations by James Cahill, retired professor from the University of California, Berkeley, and Sherman Lee, retired director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, both of whom will offer their reasons for doubting Riverbank's authenticity. Papers in support of Riverbank's early date will be presented by Professor Shou-chien Shih, Director of the Graduate Institute of Art History at National Taiwan University, who will discuss the stylistic reasons for accepting a 10th-century dating, and Maxwell K. Hearn, Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum and curator of The Artist as Collector, who will present a comparative physical examination of Riverbank and the British Museum's forgery. Three additional papers will examine other works of questioned attribution. A summary of connoisseurship methodologies by Wen Fong, Consultative Chairman and Douglas Dillon Curator of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy at the Metropolitan Museum, will conclude the proceedings.
In conjunction with the exhibition and the December 11 symposium, the Museum will also offer a series of educational programs, including gallery talks and lectures.
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August 6, 1999
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