Spider – A major find?

Is this a real Jackson Pollock?

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. Thanks Newsweek…

~ by Brett on August 15, 2007.