ART Paintings were done by Pollock, expert says

The paintings lack the familiar patterns of Pollock's work.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- A Jackson Pollock expert is convinced that 32 works found by the son of a Pollock friend were created by the artist, despite debate about their origin.
Ellen Landau, professor of art history at Cleveland Museum of Art/Case Western Reserve University, plans to disclose the results of more than a year of her own research today at the annual conference of the College Art Association in Boston.
The authenticity of the Pollock works, which include 25 completed compositions, has been debated since their discovery was made public last year by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Alex Matter, son of the artist's good friend, photographer Herbert Matter.
No pattern
The debate -- with millions of dollars at stake -- was further enflamed earlier this month when the scientific journal Nature published a story about an Oregon scientist who examined six of the paintings and could not find the pattern of "fractals" he had found earlier in known works by Pollock.
Fractal geometry -- finding patterns in chaos -- was first applied to Pollock paintings in the late 1990s by Richard Taylor, a University of Oregon physicist with an art degree and a longtime interest in abstract art. Taylor used the mathematics of fractal analysis to show Pollock had an intuitive grasp of the complex patterns of nature when he created art that some critics dismissed as mere splashes of paint. And he concluded that Pollock's style in his known works was impossible to duplicate.
But the same analysis of the sample of the works found by Alex Matter in 2002 in a storage unit belonging to his late father led Taylor to the opposite conclusion -- they "may have been painted by different hands."
Experimentation
Landau, however, says there may be a very good reason Taylor could not find the familiar fractal patterns in the disputed paintings: Pollock was experimenting with different styles influenced by Herbert Matter's photographic work.
Landau, author of books on Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, said she can show that "Pollock was looking at Herbert's work, and he was thinking about Herbert's work, and obviously the two of them were exchanging information back and forth about their experimental attitude."
She said her research at the Matter archive at Stanford University uncovered "amazing photographs" that led her to material that shows strategies Pollock had involving the works of Herbert Matter.
Still, Landau acknowledges, "The only people who really know anything about these paintings are Pollock and Herbert Matter."
Nicknamed "Jack the Dripper" by Time magazine in 1956, the year he died in a car crash, Pollock poured and dripped paint over huge canvases to create swirling, intricate layers of color and seemingly random designs he insisted were the result of deliberate technique.