Steven Litt
Plain Dealer Art Critic
At first, it was a joyous artistic discovery. Now it’s one of the hottest controversies in the art world.
Three weeks ago, with great fanfare, New York art dealer Mark Borghi announced the discovery of 32 hitherto-unknown paintings and studies by Jackson Pollock, the raging bull of 20th-century American art.
Cleveland art historian Ellen Landau, an expert on Pollock, added luster to the announcement by stating that the works are authentic.
“As soon as I took a look, I was amazed,” Landau said at the time, recalling the moment in August when Borghi first showed her the paintings. “The provenance is impeccable. When you look at these works, you know they’re by Jackson Pollock.”
Since then, however, Eugene Victor Thaw, a famous art dealer and highly respected expert on Pollock, has cast doubt on the paintings.
In comments published in The New York Times, Thaw said that at best, the paintings are works in the style of Pollock, possibly by the artist’s friend, Mercedes Matter, and/or her students.
And at worst?
Thaw made it clear he didn’t think the paintings were authentic. The Times, in promoting its article, employed the red-flag term “fakes,” which implies fraud as opposed to an innocent mistake in attributing authorship of a work of art.
In the article, however, Thaw was not quoted using the term “fakes” himself.
Thaw, reached at his home in New Mexico last week, declined to comment further.
“I have said all I’m going to say on this matter, and I really don’t want to be interviewed again,” he said. “Say what you have to say. I’m an old man now and not really interested in getting mixed up any further in this. Let these pieces be seen, and let the art world make its own judgment.”
Landau, reached at her home in Shaker Heights last week, declined to comment on Thaw’s statements.
A look
at the paintings
The dispute has cast a shadow, at least temporarily, over the paintings. And it has exposed a rift in the small, normally harmonious world of Pollock experts.
Landau is the author of a book on Pollock and has published a catalogue raisonne — or complete catalog — of the works of Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner. She has worked cooperatively in the past with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a nonprofit organization formerly presided over by Thaw.
“I’m saddened,” Borghi said. “I wished this wouldn’t have happened. I think it’s unfortunate.” He called Thaw’s statements “prejudiced, biased and baseless. All one has to do is stand in front of these [paintings], and you see it’s baseless.”
In his gallery on East 76th Street in Manhattan, Borghi displayed two of the Pollocks in a private viewing 11 days ago.
One, titled “No. 9,” was a small galaxy of white swirls and droplets over turbulent undercurrents of black and silver. Flecks of reddish-orange sparkled across the image, like sparks of energy. The pigment rested on the surface of the painting in thick layers, with each rivulet creating its own ridge of paint.
“It’s really dazzling,” Borghi said.
The other work, “No. 6,” featured streaks of yellow against a turbulent backdrop of black and blackish green.
The dealer also brought out photographs of a dozen other works from the discovered bundle. They included images of thick, red splotches of paint on a white background; large gray swirls on a yellow background; and a turbulent, jazzy composition of rich blues and violets painted in a dense thicket of splatters.
Studies done
in a New York apartment
Borghi said that filmmaker Alex Matter discovered the paintings in late 2002 or early 2003 in the Long Island town of East Hampton, N.Y., in a storage unit that had belonged to his father, photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter, a close friend of Pollock’s.
They were wrapped in brown paper, with a note scribbled by the elder Matter saying the works were experimental studies painted by Pollock in Matter’s Tudor City apartment in Manhattan, opposite the present site of the United Nations.
Matter had allowed Pollock to work in the apartment on and off from 1946 to 1949, years that coincide with his breakthrough as a painter of mural-size drip-and-splatter paintings. Pollock tacked large canvases to the floor of his barn in Springs, N.Y., also on Long Island, and used sticks and brushes to hurl paint from cans onto the surface.
Apparently, though, Pollock was working simultaneously in Matter’s apartment, making richly colored paintings with the same technique, but on a far smaller scale. The paintings saved by Matter measure from 5-by-7 inches to 15-by-18 inches.
A meeting
with Thaw
After discovering the paintings, Alex Matter approached Borghi, who was already representing the estate of Mercedes Matter, Herbert’s wife and Alex’s mother, who died in 2001. Alex brought small groups of works to Borghi, over many months, while Borghi advised him to take the works to New York art conservator Franco Lissy to have them cleaned.
“I was salivating,” Borghi said. “[Alex Matter] never really told me how many there were. I was at least 10 months into it before I understood what I was dealing with.”
In August, Borghi invited Landau to a private viewing. Together, they started to plan a national touring exhibition, to be organized by Landau, in which the paintings would play a central role. Borghi says at least half a dozen art museums are interested.
Two months before announcing the discovery of the paintings publicly, Borghi flew to Santa Fe, N.M., with five of the works. He wanted to show them to Thaw as a courtesy to one of the art world’s reigning experts on Pollock.
“When I met him, he looked at them for five minutes and just sat down to talk to me about them,” Borghi said. “The balance of the time was just discussing when we were going to publish them. He was curious about whether there were others.”
Borghi said he didn’t ask Thaw to authenticate the works, and Thaw didn’t offer to do so.
Then, as Borghi put it, “Mr. Thaw decided to weigh in and decide he was king” by debunking the paintings. The disagreement raises an age-old question about works of art: How do you tell what’s real?
In the case of the Pollocks, the facts are likely to emerge slowly. Borghi said he’s enlisting scientific experts to analyze the pigments in the paintings, which could prove whether they match the age and chemistry of other pigments Pollock used.
Matter’s scribbled note on the wrapping around the paintings indicated that Pollock had used an experimental paint developed by a Swiss manufacturer. The composition of the paint could provide a chemical fingerprint to prove authenticity.
Borghi was also recruiting artists who knew Mercedes Matter to offer testimony about Thaw’s contention that she could have painted the pictures stored on Long Island by her husband.
Graham Nickson, a former associate of Mercedes who has been contacted by Borghi, said he had no opinion on the authenticity of the paintings.
But he strongly doubted they could have been painted by Mercedes, a former friend of his. Nickson is dean of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, a job formerly held by Mercedes.
“She was very much unlikely to copy somebody else’s style,” he said. “She never made drip paintings.”
As for the works championed by Borghi and Landau, Nickson’s view is likely one shared by most observers.
“They should get the paintings out and let the sides be drawn and make some new educated observations,” he said. “The thing to do is to keep an open mind until it’s all sorted out.”