Why all the love for the "Matter Pollocks"?

Geoff Edgers has been doing a bang-up job reporting on the ongoing imbroglio at CitiCenter - so why does he suddenly go all mushy when reporting on the "Matter Pollocks" (a particularly yucky one is at left)? Incredibly, the McMullen Museum at Boston College is going ahead with "Pollock/Matters," an exhibit that supposedly explores the relationship between Jackson Pollock and the Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter, but is transparently a vehicle for keeping afloat the possibility that a cache of small Pollock-like paintings "discovered" by Alex Matter a few years back are truly by the master. "Now you can decide for yourself," the Globe helpfully explains, as if, Bush-administration-like, we were all free to create our own personal art-historical reality (I've personally decided that La Grande Jatte is by Thomas Kinkade).

It took one glance for me to decide the "Matter Pollocks" were junk - either outright fakes or so bad that Pollock hid them out of embarrassment. Over the past months, of course, the evidence has tilted toward fakery: a Harvard study declared some of the pigments weren't available in the U.S. in Pollock's lifetime, and soon after it came to light that another study, by forensics scientist James Martin, had for all intents and purposes been suppressed by Alex Matter. Since then, it's been announced that the paintings will be hung at the McMullen without attribution (Thomas Kinkade, anyone?) and the show's curator, Ellen Landau, has been spinning possible explanations for those problem pigments (she has hinted they may have come from a shop in Switzerland - after all, Pollock pal/promoter Herbert Matter - at left - was Swiss).

Yeah, and maybe that Martin report should simply be released! It's possible, I suppose, that the "Matter Pollocks" are actually just really bad, but authentic, Pollocks, done in Swiss paint - but no university should be involved in presenting a show in which a key piece of evidence has been withheld from the public. There's a longwinded explanation from the McMullen about how Martin was invited to include his findings in the show's catalogue, but refused (for reasons that remain unclear). The point is that whether or not the Martin report backs up Matter's claims is simply immaterial; the fact that it exists, but is not included in the show, makes the McMullen's methods and intents suspect, and inconsistent with what we think of as normal academic standards. Essentially, the McMullen could be viewed by those unsympathetic to Ms. Landau as colluding with Alex Matter in a deception which could reap him millions. Is that sort of activity part of the Boston College charter? The university should be backing away from the "Matter Pollocks" - or at the very least demanding that the show not go on without public access to Martin's report.

What's the matter with the Matter Pollocks?

So it turns out that there's another scientific study of the "Matter Pollocks" - only its results have been suppressed by Alex Matter himself. According to Steven Litt, art critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

"The author of an extensive and hitherto-undisclosed scientific study of a trove of works attributed to Jackson Pollock said Thursday that he is being barred from releasing his findings by the lawyer for the works' owner, filmmaker Alex Matter."

Hmmm. Now are you thinking what I'm thinking? If the results contradicted the recent Harvard study (which found that three of the supposed "Pollocks" weren't Pollocks), you'd imagine Alex Matter would be trumpeting the results to anyone who'd listen . . .

But wait, there's more, according to this scoop from Greg Cook:

"James Martin, a Williams College chemical research scientist who runs the Williamstown firm Orion Analytical, told Litt that he was hired by Matter’s art dealer to examine 23 of the “Pollock” paintings in 2005 with the agreement that he could release his findings when he was done, but now that he’s completed studying the paintings Matter’s lawyer has told him that he is “not authorized to release or disclose any analysis, findings or conclusions concerning the Matter paintings until further notice" . . . Litt carefully notes that Martin doesn’t reveal the specifics of his research, but that Martin emailed him: "I am delighted that colleagues at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston are confirming Orion's findings.” This suggests that his results agree with a recently released Harvard study of three of the Matter “Pollocks” that concluded that the paintings include paints not made until after Pollock’s death in 1956. And that the study Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is doing on four of the “Pollocks” is headed toward the same conclusion."

So . . . will the McMullen Museum go ahead with its planned exhibit of the "Matter Pollocks"? Will Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe stop promoting this "controversy"? (To be fair, Edgers has already started to backpedal.) Stay tuned. . .

The Pollock mess, version 1.2 . . .

Well, it seems there's more than one way to skin a cat. A recent Harvard study demonstrated that three of the 32 "possible Pollocks" (one is posted above; photo by Bill Greene of the Globe) recently discovered by Alex Matter are almost certainly inauthentic; pigments in the paintings weren't available during the artist's lifetime. A major setback, you'd think, for Matter's attempts to parlay his find into millions, and sure enough, the touring show of the paintings that was slated to appear at BC's McMullen Museum collapsed as a result. But the McMullen is soldiering on with a new version, this one cannily designed, it would seem, to slip the pseudo-Pollocks into the mainstream of art history.

To be blunt, there are only two interpretations possible of the 32 Matter paintings: the first is that they're outright forgeries, perhaps by Matter's father, Herbert Matter, a Pollock friend (or possibly by Matter fils, or someone else). The Harvard findings make this the unassailable conclusion about at least three. Of the remainder, one can say that either they're fakes, too (and similarities to the definite forgeries in size and quality make that the likely scenario), or, possibly, that they're weaker works by the master himself that he didn't want to see the light of day.

It's on this last possibility that the McMullen seems to have set its sights, or at least so one might assume from a close reading of the recent story in the Boston Globe. I was expecting something like this to be the next tack taken by Matter and his allies, but I was a little surprised to see that it had already been plotted, essentially, prior to the unveiling of the Harvard study.

For indeed, McMullen director Nancy "not looking for publicity" Netzer has been a busy little publicity-shirking bee. Netzer no doubt senses that as the "controversy" about the Pollocks grows, so will the crowds a McMullen show could attract (prior to the Harvard study, the show was hardly on the Boston cultural radar screen). Netzer's also clever enough to have decided to include the work of Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, in the revamped exhibit, as well as the paintings of Herb Matter's wife (more women artists = more Globe coverage). And in a brilliant twist, she's repurposing two essays commissioned for the original Matter show by Boston College art history professor Claude Cernuschi and physics professor Andrzej Herczynski.

These essays, I'd argue, will be the crux of the effort to slide the Matter canvases into the Pollock canon via the back door. According to the Globe story, art history professor Cernuschi believes "Pollock's work is distinguished from paintings of, say, the Old Masters because it has no center of attention . . . And many people have assumed that as a result, the size doesn't matter." Herczynski chimes in: "We made an argument that to maintain a Pollockian way of painting, you've got to have at least a minimum of size."

One can limn from these statements the beginning of a new "story" to deal with the Matter paintings' artistic weakness: they're experiments that Pollock abandoned as he realized he needed to scale up to achieve the effects he was after. Thus, while clearly not nearly in the league of the Pollocks we're familiar with, they still "count" as sketchbooks, as it were (albeit sketchbooks the painter himself seems to have hidden away).

As for the clear forgeries, I guess we're expected to believe that they were done as imitations of the abandoned "sketchbooks." (And I suppose we'll just have to see what Lee Krasner and Herb Matter, et. al., have to do with all this.) As a scenario, this doesn't really hang together - but I bet somebody will buy it. Just as I bet that someday, thanks in no small part to the McMullen, somebody will buy those Matter paintings as "genuine" Pollocks. And that's really the point, isn't it?