[On Painting] "Who the $!##!$* is Jackson Pollack?"

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Duane

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Nov 16, 2006, 8:54:19 AM11/16/06

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This is the title of what looks to be an interesting new documentary that is reviewed today in the NY Times. You will have to register your email address with the NYT to see it (it's free.) Here's a snippet from the article:

"Ms. Horton, a salty, outspoken woman who lives in a trailer and whose hobby is rooting through Dumpsters in search of buried treasures, has less delicate words to describe the world beyond the looking glass: “The whole art world is a fraud.” And as she jumps through hoops trying to prove the authenticity of the canvas she purchased at the Dot Spot Thrift Shop in San Bernardino, Calif., now defunct, you are inclined to agree with her.

Ms. Horton, the farthest thing from an art-world aesthete, had never heard of Pollock when she purchased a canvas she describes as so ugly that she tried to give it away to a friend (“We were going to throw darts at it,” she recalls), but it wouldn’t fit through the door of her friend’s trailer. At a garage sale a local art teacher spotted the painting and suggested it might be a Pollock. Her curiosity whetted, Ms. Horton began calling Los Angeles art dealers. Her son, Bill Page, joined the search, which became a decade-long quest for validation of her purchase.

As this smart, hard-bitten woman with an eighth-grade education pursues her quest, the documentary portrays the debate between connoisseurship and science as a culture war. Among the connoisseurs who insist that a refined eye is the ultimate judge of authenticity is Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, exuding contempt and superciliousness. He is the most outspoken in his rejection. Shown the painting, he dismisses it as “pretty, superficial and frivolous.”

Leading the scientific side is Peter Paul Biro , an equally self-satisfied forensic specialist from Canada who matches a fingerprint on the back of Ms. Horton’s painting to fingerprints found on a Pollock painting in Berlin and in Pollock’s former studio in East Hampton, N.Y. In a frivolous side trip, the film travels to England to consult John Myatt, one of the world’s most notorious art forgers, who also believes the work is not a Pollock.

As Mr. Volpe puts it: “The painting is like Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights.’ He didn’t get his inheritance until he got a title.” Now and then, you wonder if the movie itself might be a public-relations maneuver preparatory to an auction.

By the end of the film, you have the unpleasant sense that the snobs have drawn their wagons into a circle to keep out hicks like Ms. Horton and her experts, and that these smooth-talking guardians of an insular world that enriches itself through a kind of legal insider trading are deeply threatened by the intrusions of forensic science. The movie calls into question the determination of provenance, in which a history of a painting’s ownership is used for certification."