More than 10 years ago, a retired truck driver named Teri Horton bought a painting for $5 at a yard sale. The purchase became exceptional when a friend suggested that it might be a work by Jackson Pollock and the international art community took notice. Even more exceptional, however, was the method used to authenticate it.

While art scholars argued over the aesthetic aspects of the painting, a forensic art expert named Peter Paul Biro found a more material way to answer the question of authorship. Instead of looking for a vague artistic “fingerprint” of Pollock’s style, he found a literal fingerprint on the back of the canvas that matched one on a blue paint can in Pollock’s studio.

Years later, in 2002, a man named Alex Matter discovered a stack of 32 paintings in a Long Island storage facility. He was immediately aware of their potential importance.

The paintings Matter found were wrapped in brown paper that explicitly declared their identity as “32 Jackson experimental works,” and also mentioned the name, “Pollock.”

Last month, as art scholars debated what aesthetic features the Matter-discovered works shared with previously known Pollocks, scientists at the Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) announced their discovery that paint components in three of the Matter paintings that were developed after Pollock’s death in 1956.

The release of HUAM’s report only fueled the controversy, expanding the debate over whether the Matter paintings were actually Pollocks to a discussion about the terms of the debate itself. Like Biro’s forensic work, the HUAM analysis not only represented an alternative to traditional artistic analysis in its emphasis of scientific facts, but suggested that such a material fingerprint might ultimately be more distinctive than the artistic one scholars had worked years to construct.

INTO THE VAULTS

A short walk through the Fogg’s galleries encompasses most of the collection’s most talked-about paintings. To see the most talked-about paint, however, a trip upstairs is required.

In the laboratory on the top floor, a few small pieces of plastic are grouped on the desk of Narayan Khandekar, the senior conservation scientist at Harvard’s Straus Center for Conservation. They’re inconspicuous and easy to pass over, but these plastic cubes contain the kernel of a raging art-world debate.

“If you look in,” he explains, “you can see there’s a piece of paper in there. On the surface of the paper—not on the surface, but on the surface of the polished plastic—there’s a tiny speck of paint.” The paint is almost impossible to see; as Khandekar points out, it is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

These specks drew world-wide attention on Jan. 29 of this year, when Khandekar, Fogg Associate Curator of Modern Art Harry Cooper, and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and Christina B. Rosenberger of Havard’s Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art released a report declaring that some of the samples contain pigments that had not been used as artists’ paint until 1996.

Khandakar’s samples came from the paintings Matter discovered five years ago. They had been wrapped in paper that read “Pollock (1946–49) / Tudor City (1940–1949) / 32 Jackson experimental / works (gift & purchase) / Bad condition. / 4 both sides. All / drawing boards. / Robi paints. / MacDougal Alley, 1958.” Matter’s parents—photographer Herbert Matter and painter Mercedes Matter—had a close relationship with Pollock, which seemed to support the wrapper’s assertion that the paintings were authentic.

The HUAM report reads, “Alex Matter believes that Pollock completed these works in Herbert Matter’s studio in New York City between 1946 and 1949, and that he might have used paints developed by Robert (Robi) Rebetez, a Swiss art supplier and Herbert Matter’s brother-in-law.” Almost as soon as they were discovered, scholars began to question whether the works were really Pollocks.

THE BATTLE CONTINUES

If anyone has stood at the epicenter of the debate, it is Ellen Landau, Mellon professor of the humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Landau has long been known for her work on Pollock—a Jan. 30, 2007 New York Times article describes her as “one of the world’s most respected Pollock scholars.”

Landau first viewed the disputed paintings in 2005 and concluded that they were the authentic work of Pollock. Two scholars, both connected with the Pollock-Krasner foundation, quickly came forward to declare that they disagreed with Landau’s findings.

That same year, representatives of the HUAM team first met with Matter and New York art dealer Mark Borghi. According to Khandekar, those present agreed that HUAM should begin a technical analysis of the paintings.

“We met with Alex Matter and Mark Borghi and had a discussion about the pictures,” says Khandekar, “and we arrived at the conclusion that it would be mutually beneficial for us to conduct an examination of the materials used to make these pictures.” HUAM often does pigment analysis, but not with this much at stake.

The analysis began in September 2005 and continued through December 2006. It used a variety of different cutting-edge spectroscopy techniques to examine the types of pigments and binding media—the two basic components of paint—used in three of the 32 paintings.

“We try to use as many techniques as possible to cross-reference the results,” Khandekar explains. “You’ll see in the report that sometimes one technique will have the same result as another technique, and that’s a very useful cross reference. But also the different analytical techniques are sensitive to different things.”

The investigation revealed a number of both pigments and binding media that had not been patented until after the ostensible date of the paintings. As previously noted, one brown pigment, PR 254, first emerged commercially in 1986 and was only marketed as an artist’s paint beginning in 1996. The HUAM team also discovered a copolymer patented in 1963 in one painting and a terypolymer that was likely not introduced until the 1970s in another.

The HUAM report does not declare that Pollock had no part in the creation of the paintings. Khandekar does, however, say that the analyses imply that the works are not authentic Pollocks—in other words, someone else was responsible for at least part of the original painting.

“What we found were a number of pigments and binding media that were problematic to the attribution of the paintings to Jackson Pollock,” he says.

Of course, there was a chance that the original layer of paint had been laid down by Pollock, and that the newer materials had emerged during some kind of conservation effort. But Khandekar emphasizes that he and his team took this possibility into account, and that it does not affect the validity of their conclusion.

“The paintings had been treated by a conservator at some time in the recent past since their discovery a few years ago,” says Khandekar. “We talked to the restorer...he told us the materials he used, what he did, so we were very aware in our analysis of what was used by him, and when we found those materials, we made note.”

However, the materials that the report attributes to conservation efforts represent only a few of the pigments and binding materials found that were dated after Pollock’s death, making it unlikely that the conservator and Pollock were the only people to have a hand in the paintings.

SCATTERING CONTROVERSY

The report’s conclusions have naturally been problematic for scholars like Landau, whom the New York Times quoted as saying that the paintings required further investigation. Yet they’re also indicative of a larger tension in the art world, where the use of analyses like HUAM’s is relatively new.

In response to those who might resent the intrusion of scientists like him into a realm previously reserved for art scholars, Khandekar says that the materials an artist uses are vitally important to his or her work, and that scientific analysis is required to fully understand these materials.

“I think that it’s important to understand the materials that are used to make art. I’ve met a lot of artists and every one of them is incredibly specific about the material that he or she uses,” he says.

“It’s because their expression is determined through the media they choose to use. They want control of the media so that they can get their message out there,” he adds. “So the medium is so important to the artist, and you can’t determine the materials by looking. That’s been shown over and over again.”

THE PUBLIC AND POLLOCK

Although the responses to the study posted on the Web site pollockexhibit.com—maintained by the public relations staff of several of the parties who have been deeply involved with the Matter paintings—mostly question the results of the HUAM analysis, the subtle differences in their arguments demonstrate how disputed the role of scientific analysis has become.

A statement posted by Alex Matter on the site strongly contests the use of forensic tests like HUAM’s.

“Scientific analysis can attempt to eliminate a work of art as genuine, but it can’t determine if it is indeed the work of any given artist. That has been, and remains, the job of the scholar,” Matter writes.

Landau, meanwhile, does not so much take issue with the application of scientific study to art as with the methods and interpretation of the HUAM study. She notes, for instance, that pigments that had not been patented in the U.S. during Pollock’s lifetime might have been available in other countries.

Finally, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) responded by announcing on Jan. 31 that they will conduct another analysis of four of the Matter paintings, tying into an upcoming exhibition of the disputed paintings at Boston College. However, they say that the project will not attempt to verify the works’ authenticity—instead, it will discuss the modes of analysis themselves.

“The focus of this research is to bring to light the analytical methodologies and tools that can be applied to the study of painting materials, such as pigments and binders,” the MFA’s statement reads. “These findings, which will increase understanding of the place of scientific research in the art world, will be shared with the public within the exhibition as well as its accompanying catalogue.”

The MFA’s study might aim to resolve ambiguities about the proper relationship between material and aesthetic modes of analysis, but they caution that it will do no such thing for the 32 paintings, whose identity remains in doubt.

“This is not a funded study,” they write. “The research is for scholarly purposes and not for the authentication of the works.”

—Staff writer Marianne F. Kaletzky can be reached at kaletzky@fas.harvard.edu.