[MSN] Jackson Pollock for $5 - true or false? A row has erupted over a woman's claim that her junk-shop canvas is by the world's most expensive artist.

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Jackson Pollock for $5 - true or false?
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 06/11/2006

A row has erupted over a woman's claim that her junk-shop canvas is by the
world's most expensive artist. Louise Baring reports

In pictures: the world's most expensive paintings:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts//2006/11/06/bapollock06
.xml

Tomorrow night, Teri Horton, a 73-year-old former long-haul truck driver
from California, will star on David Letterman's Late Show – one of America's
best-loved television programmes – telling viewers about her unlikely
thrift-store find: a large-scale drip painting by the American abstract
expressionist Jackson Pollock, the world's most expensive artist.

   
If Teri Horton's painting is ever authenticated as genuine, it could be
worth up to $50 million 
Last week, the Hollywood entertainment mogul David Geffen sold a Pollock
masterpiece, No5, 1948, for $140 million (£75 million). If ever accepted by
the art establishment, Horton's painting could be worth $50 million (£26
million). Her story has now been made into a documentary film called Who the
#$&% is Jackson Pollock? that opens in New York next week.

"You ain't going to believe this," says Horton on the telephone from her
mobile home in Newport Beach, 70 miles south of Los Angeles. In 1991, she
popped into a thrift store in San Bernardino on the Californian coast to
find a gift for a depressed friend. 

There she found a complex, chaotic abstract canvas that she now describes as
"ugly", but nevertheless bought for $5 – knocked down from $7. Horton's pal
was, alas, unable to slip the 48inx65in painting through the narrow door of
her trailer. Faced with the same problem, Horton put it in a garage sale.

The story should end there, but Horton's life took a strange turn when an
art teacher pointed out that her painting looked remarkably like a Jackson
Pollock. "I said, 'Who the f*** is Jackson Pollock?'" recalls Horton, who
relishes repeating her story. She hurried along to her local library to find
out. Thus began her 15-year struggle with a sceptical art world – a mission
that has now become the doughty grandmother's raison d'être.

Jackson Pollock's legacy excites intense fascination, fuelled in part by his
sudden death aged 44 in a car crash on Long Island in 1956. His artistic
reputation rests on his revolutionary paintings of the late 1940s, made as
he dribbled or poured paint into intricate webs of interlacing lines,
gracefully punctuated with pools of colour.

These powerful works caused a sensation when they were first shown in New
York in 1947, prompting one European critic to announce that, compared with
Pollock, "Picasso becomes a quiet conformist – a painter of the past".

Two years later, Pollock was on the cover of Life magazine with the headline
"Is Jackson Pollock the greatest painter in America?" 

But, as the late Kirk Varnedoe pointed out in the catalogue accompanying the
1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art,
"Pollock had, in essence, one great, overpowering idea. 

It produced some of the most inexhaustible artworks of the 20th century and
then was over as abruptly as it began." Today, not surprisingly, these
sought-after canvases almost never appear on the market.

   
Horton: enjoying the ride 
"If Teri Horton's painting gained acceptance, it would be worth $40 or $50
million," says Ben Heller, a New York collector who bought two Pollocks in
the 1950s, both of which now hang in the Museum of Modern Art.

"It is impossible to make a forgery of Jackson Pollock's work," wrote Time
magazine's art critic Robert Hughes in 1982. "He had an almost preternatural
control over those skeins of paint."

Peter Paul Biro, a Toronto-based forensic scientist to whom Horton turned
after the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) decided that her
find was "not by the hand of Jackson Pollock", agrees. 

Focusing on complex techniques in conservation and authenticating works of
art, Biro has worked for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National
Gallery in London and Tate Britain. His key forensic evidence in Teri's
favour is a fingerprint he detected on the back of her canvas while
carefully collecting paint samples.

A comparison with a fingerprint on an undisputed Pollock painting in a
private collection in Berlin proved inconclusive. Biro then hurried to
Jackson Pollock's studio in East Hampton, just a few hundred yards from the
bend in the road where the alcoholic artist crashed his car into a tree in
1956. "The best way to interpret evidence is in its relationship to its
environment," Biro explains.

He approached the studio as an archaeological site, and found a second
fingerprint on a blue paint can – one of several that belonged to Pollock
and were preserved after his death.

"When the two fingerprints are put together, it is apparent that they are
one and the same," Biro says. "Since Pollock was known to work alone and had
no assistants or pupils, the probability of the fingerprint on the blue
paint can being Pollock's is very high."

Further research also showed that the paint on the floor of Pollock's studio
matched the paint on Teri's canvas. And last month, aided by Thomas Learner,
the senior conservation scientist at Tate Modern in London, Biro discovered
another matching fingerprint on Naked Man with Knife, one of six Pollock
paintings in the Tate's collection.

The only problem is that the art world does not recognise forensic evidence.
"This painting has no artistic soul," argues Thomas Hoving, former director
of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hoving recently spent 10 days
"saturating" himself in works by Pollock hanging all over New York.

Starting off at the Met, the 74-year-old connoisseur studied Autumn Rhythm:
Number 30 – one of three dense, monumental paintings that Pollock created in
1950 – running his fingers across the canvas. He then moved on to the Museum
of Modern Art down the road, where he spent several days examining half a
dozen Pollock masterpieces, comparing them with Horton's find.

"The surface of Teri Horton's painting has a totally different feel, plus
the white and yellow lines are too straight," he says. "The painting was
probably made by a decorator to please a client down in Palm Springs.
Forensic science is fascinating, but we have to have scholarship."

Harry Moses, the producer for CBS's 60 Minutes who made the Horton
documentary, disagrees. "I think that the evidence threatens scholarly
expertise. Connoisseurship no longer plays a dominant role in authenticating
works of art. The art world thinks it can dismiss Teri because she's a truck
driver. My movie is a story about class in America."

Horton faces another hurdle. Although Pollock is said to have discarded or
given away failed canvases, Horton's painting also lacks a provenance. 

"Establishing the history of the ownership of a painting all the way back to
the artist's studio is a crucial element in its authentication," says Philip
Hook, a senior director of Sotheby's in London. "Without a provenance you've
got a problem."

Yet when Horton was offered $2 million for her painting, she turned the
anonymous buyer down. More recently a collector from Dubai offered her $9
million, but Horton will not sell her work for less than she believes it is
worth.

"Teri is living on social security, but she's having so much fun," says
Moses. "She's enjoying the ride."
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/