The Recovery of the Tang Dynasty Paintings: Master Wang Wei's Ink-Wash Creation "On the Wangchuan River.".

Carl Nagin's recent query concerning the authenticity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recently acquired Chinese painting, "The Riverbank," attributed to the Five Dynasties (907-960) master, Dong Yuan, and donated by Francis Y. Tang in May, 1997 from the C. C. Wang family collection, has touched off a controversy. In his article for "The New Yorker" magazine (August 11, 1997), Nagin notes that this invaluable landscape painting, likened by C. C. Wang to Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," should be considered a forgery, possibly executed by the late notorious Chinese artist, forger, and art dealer Zhang Daqian (1899-1983). In support of this argument, Nagin's article cites a critical evaluation given by James Cahill, a leading Chinese art historian at the University of California, Berkeley. Cahill's doubts about "The Riverbank" first surfaced in his "Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings" in 1980. Based on Cahill's article, Nagin claims that the scroll now hanging on display at the entrance of the Museum's Chinese-painting galleries cannot be accepted as a ten-century painting, because of its fuzzy brushwork, structural incoherence, and unreadability. It is instead a fake sold by Zhang Daqian to the New York connoisseur C. C. Wang in 1956, both of whom, Nagin stresses, have cooperated for decades in peddling forgeries into the United States.