Back in 2002, more than two dozen small paintings labeled POLLOCK EXPERIMENTS were found at the Home Sweet Home moving company in East Hampton, in a storage locker belonging to the late photographer and graphic artist Herbert Matter, a close friend of the painter’s. Though the provenance was impeccable—these were not drip paintings picked up at a yard sale—a debate broke out over their authenticity once the trove’s existence was announced in 2005. When the pictures are shown in public for the first time, at an exhibition at the McMullen Museum at Boston College, opening Sept. 1, the arguments are sure to erupt all over again—even though the works won’t be labeled BY JACKSON POLLOCK.
Authentication is tricky—both an art and a science. The Rembrandt Research Project has downgraded former well-known Rembrandts to “school of”; just last week experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam demoted a van Gogh in Australia, reclassifying it as a painting by a peer. The official catalog of Pollock’s art was controlled by two experts and his widow, the painter Lee Krasner, who died in 1984. Later, an authentication board considered hundreds of previously unknown works but admitted only a handful. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation stopped authenticating works in 1995, but its two main experts have expressed profound skepticism that the Matter pictures are by Pollock.
But another prominent scholar who was on the authentication board, Ellen Landau, a professor at Case Western University, disagreed: she’s studied the paintings extensively, and delved into Pollock and Matter’s relationship as artists. Her research has shaped the exhibition in Boston, called “Pollock Matters,” and it will appear in an accompanying catalog. “I was excited about this as an art-historical find,” she says. But some of the scientific analysis, which casts doubt on the paintings’ authenticity, has muted her enthusiasm. “I believe there are a lot of things that point to Pollock. But there’s a mystery here that requires more research.”
That mystery has become as tangled as the skeins of color that wind and loop through a classic Pollock. Alex Matter, 65, a filmmaker who’s the son of Herbert and painter Mercedes Matter, found the small pictures—painted on cardboard in the drip style, wrapped in brown paper—after both his parents were dead. The works were dirty, and some were badly damaged. Notes on the wrapping in Herbert Matter’s handwriting included the dates “1946-49” and three references to Pollock or Jackson “experiments.” “The way my father wrapped them was not what he would have done with works of art he took seriously,” says Alex. “He was meticulous. If he thought Jackson was just experimenting, he wouldn’t have wanted to show them.” Alex, named after his parents’ friend Alexander Calder, has childhood memories of artists such as Franz Kline, who took him to Dodgers games. And one summer day in the late 1940s, Alex recalls, he ran barefoot across a wet painting on the grass outside Pollock’s East Hampton studio. His mother was furious, but Pollock decided he liked the footprint. “Jackson was fantastic with me,” he says.
Based on other notes on the wrapper, Landau speculates that if Pollock painted these pictures, it was not in East Hampton, where he and Krasner lived after 1945, but in Matter’s New York City studio, using Matter’s materials. Landau stresses that the discovery of these “Pollock experiments”—they were not finished works for gallery walls—“has opened up a Pandora’s box of Pollock’s friendships, and his relationship to sources like photography.” She learned that in May 1943, Matter exhibited experimental photographs of ink dripped into glycerin—which could have inspired Pollock’s first use of dripped paint that same year. She and fellow scholar Jonathan Katz have also looked at the influence of motion in nature on Pollock’s work—a different sort of “action painting.” In a film on Calder, Herbert Matter included footage of waves and windblown sea grass; Pollock had tagged along on the shoot, carrying equipment.
While Landau has been building her scholarly case, scientists have been applying their own methods. With Alex Matter’s blessing, three of the paintings were examined at Harvard. The results, announced last January, were troubling: each of the three paintings contains at least one pigment that wasn’t patented until after Pollock was dead. Narayan Khandekar, senior conservation scientist at Harvard, points out that the problem pigments in the three pictures are not superficial: “They exist throughout the work, so even the lowest paint layers contain them. That says the paint on those pictures had to be applied after Pollock’s death.” Others have conducted similar tests on other pictures in the group, with some similar results; one scientist, Richard Newman of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is writing a catalog essay drawing on all the findings. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation commissioned its own study of fractals (irregular patterns) in known Pollock paintings, to which the new paintings failed to compare—though that report is challenged by two other studies. “The exhibition is presenting both sides, all the evidence so far,” says Landau.
Alex Matter says he still believes the paintings are by Pollock, but he’s “definitely disturbed by the scientific evidence.” Landau acknowledges the pigment issues must be thoroughly investigated. One route to follow is another note Herbert Matter made on the wrapping: “Robi paints.” Robi was the nickname of Herbert’s Swiss brother-in-law, who had an artists’ supply store in Basel. Was Jackson fooling around with paints so experimental they weren’t yet patented?
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation isn’t cooperating with “Pollock Matters,” except for lending three Pollock book-jacket designs he may have done with Matter. (The foundation controls the copyright on all Pollock’s paintings and wouldn’t allow images of known Pollocks to be reproduced in the show’s catalog.) Science aside, some connoisseurs doubt the pictures because Pollock wasn’t known to make small studies. “He never did anything like this in his entire life,” says Ben Heller, a collector, former dealer and friend of Pollock’s. But some pictures, says Landau, appear to contain key Pollock attributes, such as daubs of paint the artist applied after he dripped, to “correct” the effect he was seeking. Scholars discovered this in his work only in 1998; before then, how could a forger have known about it?
Looming over this mystery, of course, are those dollar signs. Even if these paintings are Pollocks, they’re not $140 million classics; still, they’d surely be worth a lot in today’s overheated art market. They might even be worth something just because of their notoriety. One New York art dealer, Ronald Feldman, now owns a few of the pictures. Alex Matter says he hasn’t sold any of the rest.
The biggest mystery of all is this: if Pollock didn’t paint them, who did? And how did they wind up in that dusty storage bin? As with a maybe-Rembrandt or so-so van Gogh, the answer could take years. If we ever get one.
