Controversial work attributed to Pollock to go on display

Questions about whether
Pollock created the works have divided the art world.

By BILL VAN SICLEN

PROVIDENCE JOURNAL

Five years ago, art-world types were buzzing with news of a major discovery: a long-hidden cache of paintings and sketches by Jackson Pollock had been found in a rented storage locker in East Hampton, Long Island. At the time, the works’ pedigree seemed all but certain — the locker had belonged to Herbert Matter, a Swiss-born artist and photographer who died in 1984.

Matter and his wife, Mercedes, were longtime friends of Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner. The two couples also owned nearby homes on Long Island.

Since then, however, questions about the Pollock works have exploded into a full-blown controversy, complete with dueling experts, disputed scientific studies and threats of legal action against dissenting critics and scholars. The uproar has caused at least two museums — the Guild Hall museum in Easthampton and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y. — to cancel exhibits of the would-be Pollocks.

One museum, though, is forging ahead.

Opening Saturday

Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art is putting more than two dozen of the disputed Pollock paintings on display beginning Saturday. The show, “Poll2ck Matters,” marks the first time most of the controversial works will be on public view since their “discovery” in 2002 by Herbert Matter’s son, Alex.

According to a museum press release, the exhibit “will explore, for the first time the artistic relationship between famed American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and noted photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter.” In particular, the show will focus on “the crucial role that Matter’s technical innovations played in helping stimulate Pollock’s radical artistic conception.”

Museum officials, including McMullen director Nancy Netzer, have declined to discuss the exhibit until after it opens over the Labor Day weekend. The no-talk policy includes the show’s curator, Ellen Landau, a Pollock scholar who initially declared the Pollocks authentic, then seemed to back away from her findings in face of questions from other experts.

Though mocked during his lifetime as “Jack the Dripper,” Pollock is now considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. His trademark “allover” style, with its looping skeins and swirls of paint, is as recognizable to many people as a Picasso portrait or an Andy Warhol soup can.

And as Pollock’s reputation has grown, so have prices for his paintings. Last fall, a private collector (rumored to be music mogul David Geffen) paid $140 million for one of Pollock’s largest canvases, No. 5, 1948. The price is believed to be the highest ever paid for a painting.

The case against the disputed paintings has been bolstered by several scientific studies.