POLLOCK PAINTINGS FOUND HERE ARE NOT LIKELY HIS

By Dan Rattiner

About two years ago, a man named Alex Matter made the sort of discovery that is the yard sale version of Hitting the Lottery.

Matter was combing through storage boxes of the possessions of his late father, Herbert Matter, which, years earlier, Herbert had put into storage at the Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage warehouse in Wainscott, when he came upon a series of packages all wrapped up in butcher paper and tied with twine. Written on the butcher paper of one of the packages was “Pollock (1946-1949)” and on another “Jackson experimental works (gift & purchase).”

At the time he first saw this, Alex Matter was in the kitchen of the family home in Bridgehampton, with his grown son. Alex’s father and mother had passed on. Home Sweet Home had called. These possessions had been there for twenty years. Either pay for another year or move them out. The two men had taken them home.

“Should I throw these out?” the son asked, holding the first of them up.

The answer was no, we better have a further look. Inside these packages, they soon found a total of 32 paintings done in the style of Jackson Pollock.

Herbert Matter, a prominent photographer, had been friends with Jackson Pollock in the 1940s and 1950s. There were times that Pollock had done some painting in Matter’s studio in Manhattan when he would be in the City. He had nowhere else at that time to go to paint other than his studio up in the Springs.

Was it possible? Had the son and grandson stumbled upon paintings worth in the tens of millions of dollars?

The paintings were removed from the butcher paper and brought to the Matter apartment in Manhattan. A prominent and well-regarded Pollock scholar named Ellen Landau was contacted. In the past, she had declared other apparent Pollocks to be fakes. She would have a look.

Landau’s decision was that these were real. Other experts confirmed Landau’s position. But a few others said they just didn’t look like Pollocks. Perhaps Pollock had done them in another drip style, Matter said. They were marked Experimental.

And so the Pollocks were prepared for a nationwide museum tour around the country. Matter said he would not split up and sell these pieces. He would keep them together as a group.

But then a physics professor at the University of Oregon, Richard P. Taylor, examining photographs of the paintings, compared the rhythm and pace of the drip strokes with other fully-authenticated Pollocks. Their conclusion was that these were not done by the same man.

This was an odd conclusion to be sure, but it did give people pause. The tour, which would have included a showing at Guild Hall in East Hampton, was postponed. The Matters would await further developments.

This past week, however, a report was issued by the Harvard University Art Museums that seems to lend far more doubt to the paintings’ authenticity.

The Harvard University study, with Alex Matter’s blessing, examined three of the paintings, and had a chemical analysis made of all the paints used. The results showed that some of the paints and pigments were not patented and were probably not available at the time that Pollock supposedly made drip paintings. Pollock died in 1956. It now seems highly unlikely that these paintings were the work of the master. But still…

Ellen Landau continues to say that the paintings, by her evaluation, are authentic. The paintings had been retouched and corrected in a method used by Pollock. The handwriting on the packages had been determined to be that of Herbert Matter. She had this to say: “I can’t construct an alternate scenario that makes any sense. Science might not be wrong, but the research behind it might not be 100 percent correct. More research needs to be done.”