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A scientist's assertion that Jackson Pollock's iconic drip paintings contain a unique stylistic fingerprint has raised serious doubts over the authenticity of 32 ostensible works by the artist.
In has also poured fuel on a smoldering row with extremely high stakes, both for art experts with reputations on the line and for the paintings themselves, which will either be deemed the lost works of a master worth millions of dollars or curiosities of little value.
The new technique employed in the debate is fractal analysis or, more simply, the identification of patterns amid apparent chaos.
Pollock always reacted angrily to anyone with the temerity to suggest his paintings were just random splatterings, and Richard Taylor, a physics professor at the University of Oregon, believes that fractal analysis proves the artist's case.
Taylor, who also has a degree in art theory, began searching for fractal patterns in Pollock's work in the late 1990s by placing computer-generated grids over photographs of his paintings.
Over a period of years, he analysed 14 Pollocks, 37 imitations created by university students and 46 drip paintings of unknown origin.
Although Pollock used many different methods to pour, drip or flick paint onto his canvasses, Taylor found his works had a key characteristic in common.
"The only shared thing in Pollock's very different poured paintings is a fractal composition that was systematic through the years," he said.
"Pollock was in control," he added. "The large-scale fractals are a fingerprint of the artist's body motion."
While the other paintings Taylor examined also revealed fractal patterns, none of them displayed characteristics identical to the Pollock works.
Taylor's findings may have wallowed in academic obscurity were it not for the sensational announcement in May last year that 32 possible Pollocks had been discovered by the son of photographer Herbert Matter and painter Mercedes Matter, who were close friends of Pollock.
Several art experts, including the widely respected Pollock authority Ellen Landau, declared the paintings to be genuine, but others, including Francis O'Connor -- co-author of the definitive Pollock catalogue -- disagreed.
The New York foundation that represents the Pollock estate decided to step into the dispute and sent six of the contentious paintings to Taylor for his analysis.
Taylor's verdict, reported Thursday in the British science journal Nature, was that none of the works obeyed the fractal geometry he had observed in Pollock's work.
"I found significant deviations from Pollock's characteristics," he said, while stressing that, taken in isolation, his findings were not a basis for definitively declaring the paintings imitations.
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation praised Taylor's "valuable contribution" and cautiously said it was withholding any final opinion pending further research.
Nevertheless, Taylor's findings had a major impact and drew immediate responses from some of the experts ranged on both sides of the debate.
In a statement, Landau described fractal analysis as a "very new and contested field" and warned that authentication in art was never based on a single test.
"A range of eminent scholars and scientists have spent the last year actively engaged in examining the Matter Pollocks using historical, stylistic, archival and other analytical vectors," Landau said.
"Their findings will provide a fuller, richer picture of these works, and these will be presented publicly when completed as well as thoroughly discussed in a forthcoming book," she added.
O'Connor, meanwhile, told the New York Times that Taylor's research had reinforced his initial doubts about the newly uncovered paintings.
"What I saw was that these works had very little connection if any with Pollock's oeuvre as we know it, and further, that they appeared to me to be painted by more than one artist," he said.
In 2004, one of Pollock's signature paintings sold for 11.6 million dollars at Christie's auction house in New York -- a world record for the artist who was killed in a car crash in 1956, several decades before fractal geometry had even been defined.
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AFP 101132 GMT 02 06
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