The world's evaluation of Zhang Daqian is very interesting: some people praise him as the "king of a generation of paintings", while others say that he is a "master of disguise".
Zhang Daqian's painting life is worth mentioning, during his two-year and seven-month trip to Dunhuang from 1941 to 1943. During this trip, he had the upper hand in his life, and he could not make ends meet economically, and finally copied a total of 276 murals of various dynasties, and since then, the painting style has been reborn and renewed.
Zhang Daqian is fine
Why do you want to go to Dunhuang? There are three main reasons:
First of all
As early as when he studied art with Li Ruiqing and Zeng Nongfu as teachers, he had heard of Dunhuang, and later saw Dunhuang writing scriptures and silk paintings;
secondly
After listening to his old friends Yan Jingzhai and Ma Wenyan introduce Dunhuang art many times in Chengdu and Chongqing, he consulted a large number of materials on Dunhuang art, and he wanted to go even more;
At last
And most importantly, he was inspired by the calligrapher and painter Ye Gongqi. Ye Gongqi once urged him to abandon landscapes and flowers and bamboo, specialize in characters, and revive the decadent style of figure painting for hundreds of years. Therefore, Zhang Daqian decided on his own trip to Dunhuang.
Life in Dunhuang was very hard. Zhang Daqian and his party respectively numbered, recorded, and copied murals on the Mogao Grottoes, Yulin Grottoes, and West Thousand Buddha Caves. Among them, the numbering of Mogao Grottoes alone took five months, with a total of 309 cave numbers, and the huge and complex grottoes that are three miles long and four or five stories high are compiled into a clear network.
In addition, the work of copying is even more arduous. They procured a large number of canvases, brushes, paper, glue powder and mineral pigments, and then copied them in three groups: Zhang Daqian and others were a group responsible for the main part; tibetan painter Anji and others were a group responsible for secondary parts and coloring; and the rest were a group, responsible for processing canvases and pigments.
Zhang Daqian is copying the mural, next to a Tibetan painter
The environment and conditions for copying are also extremely harsh: the site is small, for large murals, you have to climb up the ladder, hold a horse lamp in one hand, hold a paintbrush in the other; when copying the bottom of the mural, you have to lie on the ground, and your arms are sore...
Especially in the middle of winter, it is even more difficult, everyone works with Zhang Daqian's sunrise, and the sun returns at dusk.
"Day by day, unkempt, lying in the middle of it, leisurely bamboo, sending affection, not knowing the time, as if you are in another world."
August 1943,
"Zhang Daqian Copying Dunhuang Mural Exhibition"
and
"Zhang Daqian Painting Exhibition"
Opened in Lanzhou. This is the first time that Dunhuang art has been displayed in front of the Chinese people. On the day of the exhibition, more than 10,000 visitors were presented, and Zhang Daqian's recent works were ordered out. The following year, the exhibition was exhibited in Chengdu and Chongqing, which also caused great repercussions.
Zhang Daqian copied dunhuang murals
After the master of traditional Chinese studies, Chen Yinke, wrote "The Feeling of Viewing the Dunhuang Murals of Guan Daqian", pointing out the murals copied by Zhang Daqian
"It can really open up a new realm in the art of our nation" "For the immortal grand event in the field of Dunhuang Studies"
The excitement of the praise is beyond words.
Zhang Daqian's display of Dunhuang art to the world has also influenced the life path of a large number of aspiring young people, such as Li Chengxian, the wife of Chang Shuhong, the first director of the Dunhuang Art Research Institute, who decided to go to Dunhuang after watching the exhibition held by Zhang Daqian; Mr. Ye Qianyu, a famous mainland cartoonist and Chinese painter, was also influenced by Zhang Daqian's Dunhuang murals and turned from the field of comics to Chinese painting in 1943.
Chang Shuhong and his wife's works: "Dunhuang Flying Dance Music"
But the big strokes of the tree, along with fame and honor, often accompanied by blows and criticisms.
The main crime on Zhang Daqian's back was "destroying Dunhuang murals." This cast a huge shadow over him for the rest of his life—wherever he went, there were people who inquired about it, and even his children, students, and relatives were implicated.
There are two main factions as to whether Zhang Daqian really destroyed the mural: one faction insists that he did destroy it, and the other faction holds a negative attitude.
Zhang Daqian was in Dunhuang
Two people in the affirmative faction are more authoritative. One is the historian and archaeologist Xiang Da. He recorded the murals he saw destroyed by Zhang Daqian in his book "Chang'an and the Civilization of the Western Regions in the Tang Dynasty" in the "Small Notes on the Western Expedition", such as
"The statue of Buddha Nirvana in Cave C301/P19bis... Zhang Daqian stripped off and exposed the statue of the offering monks",
"Cave C20/P16 has the inscription of Shi Hongzai, a disciple of Wei Bo on March 28, 2007, and a disciple of Zhejiang Dongdao, which was stripped away by Zhang Daqian and donated to the Dunhuang Art Research Institute, I don't know where it was originally in the cave."
and other sentences, which appear to be conclusive.
Dunhuang scholar Xiang Da
In addition, there is another person, that is, the famous Chinese critic and painter Chen Chuanxi. He talked about Zhang Daqian's destruction of murals in Dunhuang and other issues in "Zhang Daqian's Destruction of Dunhuang Murals" and "Records of the General of the Painting World".
He said that he had been to Dunhuang in 1981 and saw that the murals in many places had been stripped and destroyed by Zhang Daqian, and the most surprising thing was that he also saw that the "Handmaid's Picture" in the Tibetan Scripture Cave, that is, the seventeenth cave, was inscribed with many words by Zhang Daqian, and at the end there was his own name...
Chen also mentioned in the article that when Zhang Daqian was in Dunhuang, the central authorities urged Gu Zhenglun, chairman of Gansu Province, to drive him away, and on his way back to Chongqing, he was also inspected by the military commanders on many occasions for his luggage and vehicles.
This makes people look almost completely convinced that Zhang Daqian did indeed destroy the mural.
Professor Chen Chuanxi of Chinese Min University
But there are also some opponents who stand up to speak for Zhang Daqian. Among them, the narrative of the Taiwanese scholar Dou Jingchun is the most widely circulated:
Dou said that in the 30th year of the Republic of China, he accompanied Youyi Lanzhou to Dunhuang, and Zhang Daqian accompanied them to visit the murals of each cave, including two outer walls on the surface that had been blackened and cracked by fire smoke, and the inner layer was faintly seen as a suspected Tang Dynasty offering portrait.
In order to show everyone clearly, the entourage of a county government accidentally peeled off the surface layer with too much force. The colorful portrait of the Tang donor revealed after stripping it was copied down by Zhang Daqian.
Shortly after these two broken walls were destroyed, some foreign tourists wanted Zhang Daqian's painting but could not, so they communicated with a newspaper in Lanzhou, saying that Zhang Daqian was suspected of destroying the murals.
Xiao Jianchu, his son-in-law and disciple Xiao Jianchu, who accompanied Zhang Daqian in Dunhuang to copy the murals, exposed the inside story of the central authorities urging Zhang Daqian to leave Dunhuang and sending military commanders to inspect them on the way: It was because they did not send paintings to Commissioner Cao in the area when they were in Jiuquan, which caused the commissioner's dissatisfaction, so he went to the relevant departments in Gansu to report that Zhang Daqian wantonly destroyed and even stole the murals in Dunhuang.
These two factions have their own opinions, and their statements are justified, so that the public does not know who to believe.
In July 1948, the Gansu Provincial Senate suddenly filed a formal complaint against Zhang Daqian and added three charges to him:
"1. The deprivation damage is extremely large; 2. A large amount of theft; 3. Public sale and gifting."
The case immediately caused an uproar, and public opinion simply exploded.
Since then, Chang Shuhong, director of the Dunhuang Art Research Institute, and Dou Jingchun, mentioned earlier, have declared to various newspapers that Zhang Daqian has not destroyed or stolen dunhuang murals, let alone publicly bought and sold gifts.
"Dunhuang Flying Map", created by Zhang Daqian in 1944
Shi Huang, an outstanding cultural relics worker who has spent many years in Dunhuang, Shi Weixiang, a researcher at the Dunhuang Research Institute, and Duan Wenjie, president of the Dunhuang Research Institute, have all stood up to speak for Zhang Daqian, saying that they have not found any evidence of Zhang's destruction of the murals in the grottoes.
During this period, although Zhang Daqian also panicked, he remained silent, did not give any explanation for this matter, and still went his own way in his own painting career.
In an interview with the media, the famous calligrapher and painter Xie Zhiliu once said with a straight face:
"If you had been in Dunhuang at that time, you would have agreed to knock it out, and since the outer layer had been peeled off and there was no way to identify it, and there were certainly murals inside, why not remove the outer layer to expose the essence of the inside?"
Xie Zhiliu (third from left) and Zhang Daqian (third from right) took photos in Dunhuang
I am curious about everyone's point of view, if you are Zhang Daqian, for breaking the wall, how will you choose? It is to take the protection of cultural relics as the starting point and not to destroy them at all; or will it remove the broken wall as Xie Zhiliu said, copy the inner layer of the essence, show it to future generations, and pass on China's thousand-year-old art.
Anyway, I would like to conclude by saying two truths:
First,
Zhang Daqian did not get any oil and water from the Dunhuang murals, but was in debt. In order to maintain his huge expenses in Dunhuang, he sold a lot of rare ancient calligraphy and paintings, and also owed a debt of 5,000 taels of gold, which was not paid off until 20 years later.
Second
During his work in Dunhuang, Zhang Daqian repeatedly called on the state to nationalize the Mogao Grottoes and other grottoes that were unmanaged at that time and on the verge of extinction as soon as possible, and quickly establish relevant institutions to properly protect them.
Later, through the efforts of Yu Youren and others, the state finally established the "National Dunhuang Art Research Institute (the predecessor of the Dunhuang Research Institute)" in 1944, which incorporated Dunhuang's cultural relics and art into the protection and research of the state.
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