Excerpt

In May 2005, Alex Matter, a filmmaker and son of photographer Herman Matter and painter Mercedes Matter, announced the discovery of thirty-two early Jackson Pollock drip paintings. The full story sounded a lot like a New York version of Michael Frayn’s novel Headlong. Matter’s parents were friends of Pollock, close enough to the artist that photographs exist of them lounging about with Pollock. At least one biography of Pollock mentions the purchase of some small Pollock works by the Matters, and it is reported that Herman Matter’s signature is on the back of these works, labeling them as Pollock originals. It seems that the paintings had been languishing in a metal storage bin out on Long Island until they were discovered by Mr. Matter, not far from Pollock’s former home in the Hamptons and the scene of his fatal car accident. The press releases were accompanied by pictures of a grinning Alex Matter holding one of these paintings, which, at a distance and at the resolution of a newspaper photograph, looked suitably spattered. It’s a good story and certainly a plausible one.

But, in fact, hardly a year goes by in which someone doesn’t claim to have found a long-lost Pollock—that’s what Richard Taylor, a consultant for the Pollock–Krasner Foundation, tells me. Most of these claims are disposed of easily, their faults ranging from the obvious (misspelled signatures—“Jackson Pollack”) to the subtle (materials that were only available after Pollock’s death). Some fakes are veterans of the auction circuit and reappear every few years with a new story (“Some hitchhiker gave this to a truck driver, who brought it into my gallery . . .”), while other schemes are almost as ingenious as the artist himself, even going to the extremes of inventing a provenance by inserting appropriately faded pictures of the “discovered” work into obscure hard-to-find gallery catalogs.

BACK TO Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight