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| Mao rarely signed works. This one is both long and rare (My annotations) |
Yikes! Man cuts multi billion dollar scroll in half, thinking it was a copy!
Mao was a great calligrapher. I’ll give him that. And a great revolutionary. I’ll give him that too. Not a great guy to run a country, but calligraphy and revolution-making, great.
Still, I thought the report of a price of calligraphy, stolen in Hong Kong last week, being worth billions was a bit over the odds. I can imagine millions, but billions?
In any case, the piece is back in the original owner’s hands. BUT, in two pieces, as the guy idiot who bought it from the thief, believing it was just a copy, had cut it in two, to store it more easily.
WTF?? It’s a scroll. You roll it up. You don’t need to cut! Especially along the lines of the characters so they’re cut in two.
Did the guy not see the Mao signature in the bottom left of the scroll? Jing thinks that maybe he didn’t because he couldn’t understand the very cursive Mao style. Maybe. But still, you roll the thing up. You don’t fold it.
But I reckon that experts will be able to repair it. I did course in scroll making back in the seventies, and I know that a lot can be repaired. In fact, this experience may even make it more valuable, not less.
I went to find out what you’d have to pay for a Mao piece. Turns out quite a lot. There’s a letter of Mao, from 1948, to a journalist mate, that just went under the hammer at Sotheby’s for £519,000.
