| Issue #3- April 13, 2007 |
Drip Paintings
The Debate About “Pollocks” Found Here Takes a Strange Turn
By Dan Rattiner
Three years ago, a group of thirty-two paintings reportedly made by Jackson Pollock were found in a dusty bin in the back of the Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage Company building in Wainscott. They had been stored there in 1982 by Herbert Matter, a well-known photographer who had a house out here. His widow, Mercedes Matter, continued to store them there because she thought she ought to hang on to as many of her husband’s possessions as she could. She apparently did not know that among these possessions were paintings by Pollock. But every month, she dutifully paid the $15 storage fee, until her death in 2001.
Of course, Donna Freeman, who owns the Moving and Storage facility, didn’t know Mrs. Matter had passed on. But she did know that the bill had stopped being paid. So she sent a letter saying the stuff would be thrown out or auctioned off if it was not either picked up or the storage fee paid. This bill was received by Mr. and Mrs. Matter’s son, Alex, now grown, who went down and got all the stuff and went through it on the family’s kitchen table with his teenaged son.
When they came upon several packages wrapped in butcher paper and tied with twine, they cut them open and there were the paintings.
Alex Matter, who is a filmmaker in New York City, then held a press conference at which he announced this astounding discovery of what was likely a $50 million find in a storage bin. He then tried to give a plausible explanation of how they came to be there. It was well known that Pollock and Matter had been friends. Pollock painted most of his drip paintings in Springs. Matter had a photo studio in New York City, as well as the house out here, and both men traveled back and forth. It seemed that on one of these trips to the city, Pollock might have used Matter’s studio for painting, and then either stored them there or given them to Matter as a gift. There was a precedent for this. Pollock, who died in 1956, had given paintings to the owner of the Miller General Store in the late 1940s in exchange for canned goods when he shopped there when he was out of money.
At the press conference, Alex Matter also said that he would go about having the paintings authenticated and then take them, if they turned out to be what they seemed to be, on tour around the country. He said he would not sell them.
Last week, however, it was in the news that Alex Matter may have done just that.
The revelation came about because of an attempt to authenticate the paintings. At first, several authorities said they were real. Then, a computer company examined one of them and said the pattern of brushstrokes did not match those from other Pollock paintings. After that, several other experts came down on one side or the other and then, most recently, a study made in a Harvard University lab of the paints used revealed that some of the pigments in the paintings were not available when Pollock was alive. A scheduled showing of the paintings at Guild Hall in East Hampton was then cancelled.
After that, the whole thing began to get ugly. One group of experts began to accuse the other group. And there were even expletives hurled at the keepers of Pollock’s former home and studio on Springs-Fireplace Road, where, as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, they have attempted to keep the issues of Pollock’s life and work straight, as well as those of Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, who also painted.
One particular letter sent to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation particularly irked them. The Foundation had stated, for the record, that they were withholding their judgement about these paintings until all the facts were in, and, in the interim, would not be allowing Matter to use any copyrighted Pollock material to accompany any exhibition of these paintings. In reply, a SoHo art gallery owner and art expert, Ronald Feldman, wrote them back and said that the Foundation was acting in a prejudicial matter in withholding permission and should accept that these are Pollocks until they are proven otherwise.
After that, Matter hired another expert to look at the paintings and their paints, but before he could release his findings, Feldman stepped in and said he would file a lawsuit against the expert if he did so.
At this juncture, the Chairman of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation recalled that, at a luncheon in 2005, Feldman had told him offhandedly that he had bought some of the disputed Pollocks from Matter, and that he and Matter owned a few of them jointly. Remembering this, the Chairman, Charles Bergman, now went public to essentially accuse Feldman of secretly lobbying for his own self-interest.
Had he really purchased paintings? If so, how much had he paid Matter? There were others at that luncheon that remembered Feldman bragging about his purchase. Was it really appropriate now for him to send the Foundation a scolding letter if, as it now appears, he was also an owner of some of the paintings? Why had he stepped in to threaten the latest expert?
At this point, the ball is in Alex Matter’s court. He is in the hospital, however, recovering from recent surgery and is unavailable for comment. And Feldman referred all calls to his attorney. Perhaps it is just a tempest in a teapot. But, perhaps not. More will be revealed soon.
But if I might say so, it doesn’t look good for those rooting that it’s possible to find something worth its weight in gold at a storage yard.
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