Sunday, June 05, 2005
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.”

By CAROL KINO
Published: June 5, 2005

SINCE the advent of the museum blockbuster in the 1970’s, which helped usher in the concept of the museum as a must destination, art’s growing popularity with the mainstream public has become something of a double-edged sword.

For those who have always considered themselves art lovers, the reactions tend to fall into two camps. There are the Pollyannas, delighted to see more people getting clued in to the joys of art. And then there are the skeptics – those who deplore the idea of art being used to pump up tourism, or who simply resent all those extra bodies getting in the way.

And now the popularization of artists and museums has yielded something else to feel ambivalent about: the first art-focused self-help book, “How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self: Life Lessons From the Master.”

Previous works by the author, Roger Housden, who wrote the best-selling “Ten Poems to Change Your Life,” have celebrated poets like Rumi and Robert Bly. This time he metes out the pop-Buddhist-mysticism treatment to the life and work of the 17th-century Dutch master.

Mr. Housden’s book is largely focused on Rembrandt’s renowned self-portraits, in which he charted the changes in his visage from cocky youthful promise to destitute old age. The gist is that despite Rembrandt’s all-too-human flaws, he at least had the courage to repeatedly face himself in the mirror – and we can learn from this example. To this end, Mr. Housden has shoehorned the master’s life and work into six “lessons,” with titles like “Open Your Eyes,” “Troubles Will Come” and “Keep the Faith.” It almost goes without saying that we encounter “the presence of angels” along the way.

Although museum officials might be expected to dismiss this book as a frivolous exercise, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Its publication has been timed to coincide with the show “Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits,” which originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It reopens Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and on Friday Mr. Housden is scheduled to give two gallery talks and hold two book signings there. Effectively that gives his book the museum’s imprimatur. The reason? “Synergy between his new book and our new exhibition,” said Cathryn Carpenter, the Getty’s programming director. “It just seemed to fit so well.”

And although skeptics might be appalled by the book’s sentimentality, some among us may similarly find it hard to dismiss out of hand, because Rembrandt, in Mr. Housden’s retelling, seems a weirdly savvy choice for a contemporary everyman figure.

Not only did the artist, after his wife’s death, juggle what Mr. Housden terms a “blended” family, as well as two live-in romantic relationships, one of which disintegrated into ugly legal actions; he also managed to bankrupt himself by the age of 50 with out-of-control spending and an ill-advised real estate loan.

Better yet, the story of his descent and redemption takes place in 17th-century Amsterdam, soon after that city had spawned the world’s first stock market. Certainly, the art world in which Rembrandt rose to fame seems remarkably like our own: it was driven by wide and eager collecting and rampant speculation, and offered so many artists and opportunities that no clearly dominant style emerged.

Indeed, Mr. Housden is not the first writer to seek inspiration in 17th-century Dutch art and life. In the last six years, many others have mined this golden age: think of “Girl in Hyacinth Blue” by Susan Vreeland, “Girl With a Pearl Earring” by Tracy Chevalier and “Tulip Fever” by Deborah Moggach. Each uses a portrait to dramatize the way individual lives can be mirrored and transformed when a person’s image is transmuted into paint.

And for anyone who has ever sat through a high-stakes auction, where artworks often get applauded for the amount of money they bring, there seems nothing too terrible about encouraging more people to see creativity, struggle and personal inspiration, rather than dollar signs, when they look at paintings on museum walls.

Mr. Housden certainly does his bit by presenting Rembrandt as a tortured soul who was impelled to paint and act as the spirit moved him, whatever the consequences. Yet many will undoubtedly recoil at this portrayal, for if there is anything that makes Rembrandt seem truly contemporary, it is that, especially since his death, his life and body of work have always been marked by one constant: continual flux and reassessment. (This is also what makes him such a perfect pop-Buddhist subject.)

Though Rembrandt was greatly admired in his lifetime and beyond, he was initially viewed as something of an iconoclast because of his idiosyncratic choice of subject matter and style. Yet in the 19th century – another era when art was wildly popular, with a widespread audience to match – he was recast as a free-spirited Romantic genius, intent on pursuing his own bliss. (This is pretty much how Mr. Housden presents him today.) No wonder that from this point the number of paintings attributed to Rembrandt steadily increased, leaping from 377 in 1900 to 714 in 1923.

In 1968, the Dutch government began financing the Rembrandt Research Project, an association of scholars who set about sorting the real Rembrandts from the chaff. Since then, many works that earlier generations believed to be by the master himself – including at least one self-portrait – have been reidentified as the work of his multitudinous students and workshop assistants.

One result has been that in the last 20 years – what some might call the golden age of American skepticism – much ink has been spilled on Rembrandt reattributions and reassessments. Gary Schwartz, in his 1985 biography, “Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings,” asserted that the artist’s aesthetic choices were often influenced by his patrons’ tastes. Svetlana Alpers, in “Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market” (1988), illuminated his marketing strategies. And many shows organized since then have focused on what Rembrandt is or isn’t, most notably the Metropolitan Museum’s 1995 “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt.”

Mr. Housden’s book includes a reading list, as well as an appendix noting all the places in this country where it is possible to see Rembrandt’s paintings, including the Wynn Collection in Las Vegas. Yet it includes no nod to Ms. Alpers or Mr. Schwartz, and no mention of the Rembrandt Research Project.

As Simon Schama, author of the 1999 biography “Rembrandt’s Eyes,” once wrote in this newspaper, “Every generation gets the Rembrandt it deserves.” If there is one lesson we can glean from Rembrandt’s life and work today, it is probably that fervently held romantic beliefs are seldom based in reality. The publication of Mr. Housden’s book underlines that in art, as in life, we tend to cling to them anyway.