Curiouser and Curiouser. The New York Times reports today that Alex Matter, who announced two years ago that he had found a previously unknown horde of small Jackson Pollock drip paintings, has quietly sold some of them to the New York gallery owner Ronald Feldman. The Times says Feldman bought some entirely and holds others jointly with Matter. Feldman would not comment on the paintings and the Times adds that it’s still unknown whether he’s resold any of them.
This is quite a surprise, since it was just last January that the art museums of Harvard University, which had conducted chemical analysis of several of the works, issued a report concluding that at least some of them contained pigments that weren’t available commercially until years after Pollock’s death in 1956. As the Times story notes, both Matter and Ellen Landau, a prominent Pollock scholar who supports Matter’s claims, have issues with that study. Which is why another part of the story — much of which was provided to the Times by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, guardians of the Pollock flame who are sceptical that the Matter Pollocks are genuine — is especially interesting.
Recently the [Pollock-Krasner] foundation learned that Mr. Matter had commissioned a forensic scientist, James Martin, in Williamstown, Mass., to conduct an extensive chemical analysis of many more of the paintings. But Mr. Martin has yet to release the results of the study, completed last fall. In a February article about the paintings in The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Mr. Martin said he had decided not to release the results after being threatened with legal action by Mr. Matter’s lawyer, [Jeremy] Epstein.
The Times duly reports that Epstein denies having threatened Martin with legal action, though he acknowledged to the Times “that he had told Mr. Martin he was not authorized to release the report because Mr. Matter did not feel that it was complete.”
So when — if ever — will we see it?
Meanwhile, whether the news that Feldman has bought some of the paintings means that he knows something we don’t, or merely that the art market has become even more irrational than usual, is a question I won’t try to answer here. But it will be interesting to see how much of the detail of the whole strange episode will be reflected in the wall texts of the upcoming exhibition — guest curated by Matter’s ally, the Pollock scholar Landau — that will put 25 of the purported Pollocks up on the walls of the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College in September. What I’ll be particularly interested to see is how much the McMullen will let visitors know about the controversy around Martin’s strangely delayed report. And, presuming that the Times story is correct, whether the Museum will also let visitors in on the news — in the wall texts, not just buried in the catalogue — that many of the works are now owned by a dealer, with its important implication that there is now real financial incentive, at least for some people, to legitimize the Matter discoveries as Pollocks.
Like I said. Curiouser and curiouser.