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- Convenor:
-
Christina Laffin
(University of British Columbia)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Melanie Trede
(Heidelberg University)
- Section:
- Pre-modern Literature
- Sessions:
- Saturday 28 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel presents new discoveries and emerging research on the forgery of medieval and early modern texts and objects. What do falsification and authentication tell us about the production and reception of literary works, historical documents, and masterpieces of art?
Long Abstract:
What makes a work a forgery and how does its production harness notions of authenticity and expertise? What do past and present efforts to authenticate tell us about literary authority, economic interests, and the historical and art historical contexts in which veracity is determined? This panel brings together five scholars from Europe, Japan, North America to consider how forgery has been defined from the eighth century to the present and what this reveals about the production and reception of counterfeits and "authentic" works. Our panelists take us from early medieval poetry circles, through the late medieval "golden age" of counterfeit documents, and into late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century ukiyo-e. The first paper addresses textual and sociocultural evidence for reevaluating a poetic treatise often attributed to Fujiwara no Teika. A close examination of the commentary reveals an implied reader eager for poetic knowledge and the historical context of competing claims to authority which necessitated the production of fraudulent texts such as the Maigetsushō. The second presenter considers how forgery may be defined based on legal and cultural discourses seen in falsified texts asserting imperial patronage of artisan groups. What economic and institutional authority was offered by such documents even as their semi-fictive nature was accepted? The final paper presents the shocking rediscovery of an Utamaro painting in 2014 and the aftermath of scrutiny and debate over historical and visual evidence. How does the determination of authenticity of Fukagawa in the Snow and its two related works expose the murky distinctions between forgery and verified masterpiece? Our convener and discussant will bring perspectives from literary studies and art history to stimulate discussion.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 28 August, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses legal and cultural attitudes toward documentary forgery in premodern Japan. It examines late medieval forgeries on artisanal privileges to consider ideas of forgery/falsity and how laws were (at times openly) transgressed to maintain institutional order and economic survival.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses legal and cultural attitudes toward documentary forgery in premodern Japan. The earliest known laws regarding counterfeit documents originate in the eighth century and continue to appear in various court and warrior regulations through the end of the sixteenth century. Despite lacking an official definition of forgery, government bodies and individuals were tasked with determining a text's authenticity and thus maintaining the integrity of bureaucratic documents that were used to maintain and administer institutional order. In this talk, I will survey documentary forgery in the context of these formalized structures, after which I offer an examination of several cases of counterfeit document production in the sixteenth century. Scholars have characterized Japan's late medieval period as the start of a "golden age" of forgery production, a time in which the devolution of central authority left room for false documents to proliferate. However, I complicate this view (as well as the boundaries of "forgery" itself) by considering the creation of dubious official records as well as semi-fictive, legendary texts that granted imperial economic privileges for metal caster organizations. In an effort to revitalize and stabilize imperial patronage, laws concerning forgery were (at times openly) transgressed in order to maintain the court's economic and institutional order while securing the profits necessary to survive
Paper short abstract:
The rediscovery of a long-lost painting attributed to Utamaro stunned the art world in 2014 and sparked an international controversy about the triptych to which it may belong. After an overview, I will discuss the evidence and offer an analysis of authenticity for these ukiyo-e paintings.
Paper long abstract:
In March 2014, the Okada Museum of Art made an announcement that stunned the art world: it had rediscovered a long-lost painting attributed to famed Japanese artist, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?-1806). Titled Fukagawa in the Snow, the last public exhibition of the painting was in 1952 at an Utamaro exhibition held at the Matsuzakaya department store in Tokyo. It was long considered part of a triptych on the theme of Snow, Moon, and Flowers, and the two other paintings—Moon at Shinagawa and Cherry Blossoms at Yoshiwara—had been available for view for decades at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, respectively. With this rediscovery, the three paintings could be reunited—and subsequently were at the Freer/Sackler in 2017—for the first time in over a century. Since the rediscovery of Fukagawa in the Snow, all three paintings have come under scrutiny and their attribution to Utamaro disputed. Few topics have become as heated in the field of ukiyo-e studies in recent decades, and arguably none with stakes as high. In this talk, I will begin with an overview of the Freer/Sackler exhibition (for which I was curator), the debates around these paintings, and their relationship to the global art market where artists are marketed as brand names. I will then turn to address issues of authenticity in the works, evaluating the historical and visual evidence. In my closing remarks I will take up the status of these paintings along the slippery continuum between forgery and masterpiece.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the method and historical background behind the production of forged poetic commentaries in medieval Japan. Focusing on the Maigetsushō, purportedly by Fujiwara no Teika, I will consider show how Teika's poetic authority and epistolary style were embodied and exploited.
Paper long abstract:
Despite ongoing debate over the authenticity of the waka commentary the Maigetsushō, the predominant view has been that it was authored by Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) around 1219. This presentation will draw from textual and socioliterary evidence to show that the commentary is a forgery which references fourteenth-century methods of poetry composition and adopts an epistolary style devised to captivate readers. As a work by Teika the commentary may be false, but it reveals the desire of potential readers/waka practitioners to learn from Teika in the years after his death when his authority as an arbiter of poetic practices increased. The epistolary mode adopted by the Maigetsushō imbues it with a style reminiscent of poetic teachings conveyed directly from a master to practitioners in an "authentic" voice. The intention of the author of the commentary was not to create a passable forgery but to faithfully reproduce the actual sentiments and teachings of Teika. This stance is in keeping with the methods of forged religious texts during the same period, which claim to be written by the founders of sects. At a time when poetic authority was divided and contested among Teika's descendants, and the imperial line had diverged into two competing lineages, the possession of teachings by Teika would have helped one faction establish itself over another. The Maigetsushō and new discoveries about its origins thus illuminate the medieval environment for literary forgeries and the enduring appeal of such texts.