Pollock Matters and its catalogue lead us into the secrets of Pollock’s “invention” of those drips that looks so cool wrapped around your torso.

I took an interest in this exhibition first of all, because it seemed that some of the problems raised and the methods proposed might inject some life into the discipline of connoisseurship, which has been languishing in academia for around a quarter of a century now with little sign of revival, except in departments which maintain active programs in museum studies or conservation. I consider the subject worthwhile, because the primary evidence in art history consists of the artifacts themselves, and common sense (although not a fashionable entity in the more rarified academic circles) informs me that the art historian and the critic ignore the building blocks of knowledge at their peril. Even if one’s interests go beyond the “where,” “when,” “what,” and “by whom,” one needs to know them well, or at least to understand their nature as evidence. Today, while a student may find an opportunity to study connoisseurship in conjunction with conservators and laboratory technicians, traditional eye-training survives mostly in the institutions of the art market.[1]

While the initial work on fractals and the authentication of Pollock’s work by Richard P. Taylor, an associate professor of physics at the University of Oregon, much discussed in the popular press and subsidized by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, shows signs of weakness, not least in its cursory publication, the critiques of this work by Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur of Case Western Reserve University and by Claude Cernuschi and Andrzej Herczynski, a physicist and an art historian from Boston College, who contributed to the Pollock Matters catalogue as a team, seemed to offer more promising preliminary groundwork for a method which might well enrich the methodology of connoisseurship, not only as a working method, but as an extension of the definitional and categorizing activities of the connoisseur. New approaches like this are what connoisseurship needs if it is to undergo any sort of revitalization. It is unfortunate that academic and curatorial art historians have not become more deeply involved in the discussion. The continuing dialogue and investigation, both in the immediate context of the exhibition at Boston College and elsewhere, have been pursued primarily by conservators and scientists. As far as the community of art historians is concerned, Nicholas Eastaugh’s compelling statement fell on indifferent ears: “We need an informed, impartial debate bringing together art historians and scientists if we are to solve the seemingly intractable problems these paintings present. Perhaps only together we can become the competent critics and historians the field demands.”

Like many exhibition catalogues today, Pollock Matters consists of a collection of essays by various researchers, each offering its own point of view and method. These fall into three groups. Art historians Ellen Landau, Claude Cernuschi, and Jonathan D. Katz introduce the themes of the catalogue and lay out the biographical, historical, and intellectual background of the relationship between Pollock and the Matters. In the second, Claude Cernuschi joins Andrzej Herczynski and David Martin in two essays discussing Pollock’s technique and fractal analysis. The third part of the essays consist of discussions of the materials and techniques of the Matter paintings in relation to authenticated works by Pollock by Richard Newman, Michelle Derrick, Nicholas Eastaugh, Bavini Gorsi, and Peter Paul Biro. The appendices consist of a useful chronological outline of the relationship between the Matters and the Pollocks, as well as an account of the two conservation campaigns on the Matter paintings.

At this point the reader may wish to refer back to Part I for a reminder of the basic issues, but here they are anyway. In 2002, following his mother’s death Alex Matter found a package in his father’s storage locker, which was inscribed as follows in Herbert Matter's handwriting:

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

It contained 32 paintings which recalled family friend Jackson Pollock’s drip style. Alex approached William O’Reilly and later Mark Borghi, Mercedes’ dealer. Since some were in dire condition, actually disintegrating, they were hastily conserved. When the time came for them to be studied, the Pollock Krasner Foundation took a negative point of view, and, although the Foundation had abstained from pronouncing on questions of attribution for some years, but they changed that policy in the case of the Matter paintings. Not only did they fund Taylor’s fractal research, but the art dealer Eugene Thaw, President Emeritus of the Foundation and Francis V. O’Connor, who co-authored the catalogue raisonné of Pollock’s works, made public statements questioning the authenticity of the paintings, while Ellen Landau supported it. Thaw even issued an extraordinarily aggressive statement,  “I’ve spent nearly half my life working on Pollocks, and if Ellen Landau’s opinion prevails, people will happily buy them and they’ll go into museums and books, but not the ones that I have anything to do with.” As the copyright holder of Pollock’s and Krasner’s work, the Foundation has also placed restrictions on how the Matter paintings are shown and published. Hence the small, almost useless reproductions in the catalogue, its most significant shortcoming. In spite of the controversy about their attribution, the paintings have revealed in a most vivid way the artistic exchanges which flourished between the Pollocks and the Matters. Matter, as learned and thoughtful artist with multifaceted outlets, provided a theoretical stimulus to the more intuitive talents of his wife and their friends.

While Ellen Landau’s essay brings all this together within the purview of the relations of the Pollocks and the Matters, I shall begin with Eastaugh’s valuable essay, “Analyzing Jackson Pollock: Scientific Methods and the Study of the Matter Paintings,” because it does in fact offer some salutary proposals for the moribund discipline of connoisseurship, mainly by offering scientific theoretical models in a way in which they can (and should!) be discussed by art historians and, in particular, by offering a critique of the methods employed in the examination of the Matter paintings. In it Eastaugh provides a probing overview of technical examination which should be on any relevant syllabus. At the very beginning, after stating his "commitment to the scientific method and its application to art” he broaches “the science of authenticity,” a theoretically under-supported and methodologically flawed practice at best. However, he is able to outline a recognized group of procedures on which the “science” is based, consisting of examination with imaging techniques like X-ray, microscopic examination, chemical analysis of materials, examination of “technique,” and the comparative study of historical documents on materials used in the past. New methods are in limited use, and all methods require further refinement in their application.

Eastaugh draws a useful distinction between the process of determining authenticity and that of making an attribution. The latter is, as he writes, “both pro-active and controversial,” involving “taking a painting without prior assumptions , and, through analytical means, determining authorship.” The determination of authenticity, on the other hand, “involves the application of analytical methods to uncover contradictory evidence for what something is believed to be.” The philosophical foundation for this process is Sir Karl Popper’s concept of falsification, whereby if one piece of counter-evidence is found, the belief in question must be abandoned.

Three particular problems emerge from Popper’s concept: underdetermination, the Quine-Duhem problem, and what he calls the ”hypothesis test” problem. In other words, first one must be sure that one is testing the right hypothesis. Also, since hypotheses must consist of several components, one must have sufficient knowledge of the subject to grasp these components. Thirdly one’s tests must be procedurally sound, i.e. one’s equipment should be calibrated correctly and the tests carried out in the proper way. Another method is dating. If, for example, a pigment or a binder is found which was not in use until after Pollock’s death, it will establish the necessary counter-proof, but one must of course be certain that this is factual. Commercial paints are often not patented, and therefore documented, until after they have been on the market. The situation is further complicated by the possibility that Pollock may have had access to experimental materials from Europe through Alex Matter’s brother-in-law, “Robi” (Robert Rebetez, who kept a highly regarded artist’s supply shop in Basel), who is mentioned by name on the wrapper in which the paintings were contained. Ultimately the more we know of the object of study, the more facts we have from which we can deduce interesting conclusions. The problem remains that few of Pollock’s finished paintings have undergone technical analysis, and more remains to be done on the Matter paintings. In this way, Eastaugh performs the valuable service of providing a methodological framework for the analyses of Newman, Derrick, and the others. He closes with a quotation by Giovanni Morelli: “It has been said, sarcastically, that the art connoisseur is distinguished from the art historian by knowing something about the art of the past. If he happens to be of the better sort he abstains from writing on the subject. On the other hand, the art historian, although writing much about art, really knows nothing about it; whilst the painters who boast of their technical knowledge are neither competent critics nor competent historians.” As Henri Zerner, from whom Eastaugh derived the quotation, continues: “If I had to define connoisseurship, I would say it is the articulation and symptomatic examination of the visual evidence. If we understand it in this sense, it is hard not to agree with Morelli that it has to be the necessary foundation of art history.” The fact remains that few connoisseurs or art historians have become seriously engaged in problem of the Matter paintings.

Connoisseurship is not an intellectual discipline—although it may have acquired some intellectual trappings, as it rolled along. It is a skill that is developed through deliberate practice and chance experience. In this spirit there is no exercise I could recommend more highly than working with unfamiliar material. Although I did once study Pollock from this point of view some years ago, it was a matter of a few drawings taken from his estate, and not an unknown, as the Matter drawings appear to be. [2] The Matter paintings purport to be small-scale experiments executed around the time of Full Fathom Five (1947)—the period in which he was developing his drip technique. Now the nature of intentionality in Pollock’s drip paintings is fundamentally different from that of a Dürer, a Raphael, a Delacroix, or a Picasso. In painting Pollock presumably tapped his will deep within his physical energies, far out of range of the intellectual control essential to classical art. What’s more there is the question of scale. The muscular process, and therefore the creative process, is necessarily different in a 50 x 30 inch canvas like Full Fathom Five, and a card or sheet of paper averaging roughly 9 x 12 to 12 x 18 inches. The experience of making them would be totally different. We must ask if it was even like Pollock to work his way into a large-scale conception through small, experimental works. His known drawings in his fully developed drip style tend to be significantly larger, at least twice the size of the Matter drawings. In examining the Matter paintings on two visits to the exhibition, I thought that in several the overall “design structure” corresponded with Pollock’s recognized work: the patterns of paint, their relationship to each other, and to the edges of the support were convincing, but would these forms necessarily work the same way on such a small field, when Pollock is calling on the muscles of his fingers, hand, and forearm rather than his entire body?

 Claude Cernuschi and Andrzej Herczynski address just these questions in their essay, “Cutting Pollock Down to Size: The Boundaries of the Poured Technique.” They begin by justly observing that Jackson Pollock is generally associated with his large paintings rather than his small ones, in spite of the fact that a census of his work conducted by Jeffrey Wechsler and Donna Gustavson has established that only 25% of it exceeds 72 inches in one dimension and around half of it is under approximately 36 x 36 inches. While they never use this to say more than that it supports the possibility of Pollock having painted such works as the Matter paintings, they move into important and interesting corollaries like the points I have mentioned above, about the physical and technical differences between painting a small work and a large one. They fail to mention, however, the mundane fact that, since in most cases, including even Pollock’s dripping method, a the making of a large work involves considerably more time and effort than the making of a small one. What’s more, it is harder to sell, and there is no reason to believe that Pollock’s legendary self-destructiveness went that far.[3]

In fact many artists—from Cimabue onwards and probably always—have painted simultaneously on large and small scales, and this had important aesthetic and technical implications as much for, say, Annibale Carracci, as it did for Pollock. Ignorance of scale in comparing photographs of one of Annibale’s small oils on copper with a panel from the Farnese Gallery can lead to gross misunderstandings. Scale affects proportion, modeling, and color. Cernuschi and Herczynski discuss the interrelationship between scale and the more intangible aspect of technique most intelligently, but perhaps most thoroughly and cogently in discussing Pollock’s larger canvases. A detailed analysis of one or two small Pollocks would have been helpful. They emphasize the importance of scale in respect to Pollock’s “allover” aesthetic, his avoidance of any focus of interest, which makes it only more difficult to make the transition from large to small. (They rightly observe that if one were to reduce a large Pollock and enlarge a small one to the same size in a photograph, they would look remarkably different, and the would have had no reason or means to make such broad lines in the large work as appear in the small. They also point out that the size of Pollock’s paintings is anthropocentric, not only in terms of his own bodily dimensions, but in that of the viewer. All is related to the measure of man. However, if Mark Rothko said that he painted large works in order the provide a human-scaled and intimate expression, there was an element of shrinking man down to the appropriate size. Furthermore, there may well be some edge—even snideness—in Rothko’s statement. 

At this point Cernuschi and Herczynski are ready to embark on the question of natural form in Pollock’s art in terms of order and chaos and of nature and convention. Here they introduce the notion of fractal geometry and its ability to provide partial analyses of the forms in his work, as well as Pollock’s devotion to “naturalness.” In conclusion they make a crucial point, that is, that it was Pollock’s quest for the natural that led him to abandon some of his control as an artist. “What makes Pollock’s art singular...is not his concern with or even metaphorical evocation of nature, but the extent to which he relied on chaotic dynamics—the two perturbative mechanisms affecting the flow of paint under gravity—to ‘co-author’ his poured abstractions.” Here Pollock was in accord with his contemporary John Cage, who also sought to relinquish some of his control as a composer setting down precise notations of pitch and duration in his score.

Although Richard Taylor pursued some fractal analysis of paintings by Jackson Pollock in the 1990’s, we would not be discussing the subject today if the Pollock-Krasner Foundation had not funded his work on six of the Matter paintings, which, according to accounts published in Nature and the New York Times simultaneously on February 9, 2006, cast doubt on their authenticity.

It is interesting to note that Taylor has applied fractals to the study of other kinds of art, for example the architecture of Frank Gehry. It is also interesting to observe how fractal geometry, a mathematical system which has been used to analyze natural forms like trees and ocean waves, has come to function as a tool for the analysis and attribution of works of art, at least in an inchoate way. Pollock himself explicitly compared his work—or rather himself—to nature. In their catalogue essay, Cernuschi, Herczynski, and Martin go into far greater methodological detail, providing colleagues with a useable definition of the science and its application, and the layman with a valuable introduction to the subject. You will find no clearer, simpler explanation of what fractals are and how scientists work with them. Beyond that, their argument is basically a critique of Taylor’s incompletely published studies, demonstrating that the results of fractal analysis of Pollock’s works is in many instances ambiguous. While some of his securely attributed paintings exhibit fairly consistent fractal patterns, others do not. For example Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur in their own research project showed that Pollock’s Wooden Horse, Number 10A (1948) “‘fails to satisfy the fractal authentication criteria’ employed by Taylor.” The diminutive size of the Matter paintings is another factor likely to have affected their relation to fractal geometry. Non-conformity to fractal patterns is not a criterion for rejecting an attribution to Pollock, as defined in Eastaugh’s Popperian method.

The authors also discuss in some detail Taylor’s conclusion that Pollock’s paintings are not only fractal, but double-fractal, that is, consisting of two characteristic dimensions, i.e. “the artist’s arm movements and the instabilities of his paint.” Other researchers have found this quality in the work of other artists working in a similar mode, for example, Jean-Paul Riopelle. Here they point to yet another interesting parameter, “edges,” that is the “luminance gradients between adjacent colors.” Of course anyone who has examined graphic works or, above all, paintings under even moderate magnification will know that there is virtually no such thing as a pure line, that is, one totally free from gradations or irregularity of some sort.

Their own fractal analyses demonstrate the limitations of the method yet further, especially under the circumstances that our data is so incomplete, barely 5% of Pollock’s oeuvre. Taylor’s implication that fractal analysis and other scientific methods can provide objective criteria for attribution which could threaten to make the subjective criteria of connoisseurs obsolete is naive, to say the least. Given the persuasiveness of the authors’ scepticism, one might ask if fractal analysis is at all worthwhile, since it will clearly not replace the variety of methods traditionally brought to bear on problems of attribution. The mere fact that some works of art do exhibit fractal characteristics is sufficient to justify the continuation of this research. Too little is understood about it at this early stage of research. Another sobering fact is that computer-generated fractal art, a popular genre in certain circles, looks profoundly different from “handmade” art, which rarely if ever shows the same consistency and detail. What’s more, I have yet to see one of these works that engages me as a beautiful or moving work of art.

The ultimate confirmation of an attribution is the ability to fit the work under study into a biographical, historical, and intellectual context. In fact, although the Matter paintings themselves remain in question, the most fruitful results of the exhibition appear in this quarter, as set forth in the Introduction by Cernuschi and Landau, Landau’s own essay, and Jonathan Katz’s study of the philosophical background of Pollock’s and Matter’s connection.

Taking Michael Leja’s extensive discussion in Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940’s as his point of departure, Katz attempts to provide a spiritual matrix for Pollock’s drip paintings, relying primarily on certain statements by Pollock, his high school art teacher, Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a book which is known to have been in his library, and inferred interests of Herbert Matter. Since it is known that Pollock was not a great reader, it is assumed that he would have absorbed these notions from his more theoretically inclined European friend. There is no doubt that Schwankovsky, a Theosophist and friend of Krishnamurti, had a profound influence on Pollock, the alienated teenager in a middle-class high school, who desperately craved guidance and became, at least for a while, a passionate apostle of Theosophy. In the book, Modern Man: His Belief and Behavior (1936), the author Harvey Fergusson  expressed a debt to the philosophy of Henri Bergson and its concept of the élan vital. Of course we have no idea what Pollock thought of it or if he even read it. Fergusson was a popular and even respected writer of novels about the American West. His work was considered the quintessence of Western life and traditions, and Pollock may well have been attracted to it as part of his identity as a Westerner. However, Fergusson and other popular writers mentioned by Leja also show how Bergson’s philosophy as well as elements of Theosophy and the teachings of eastern gurus like Krishnamurti might freely flow together (although Bergson and the Theosophists could not be more different), especially in Pollock’s alcohol-sodden mind. Herbert Matter’s work with photographic impressions of electrical charges and Edgerton-like motion photography doubtless reflect this interest, but it is too much to say that, because he was Swiss, he was familiar with the Goetheanum outside Basel and the teachings which lay behind it. (As a modernist he may have found it fascinating.) It would certainly be interesting and valuable to know more about Matter’s view of the world, but not enough is understood to get a very clear idea of how he might have influenced Pollock, beyond the palpable connections in their work (as amply demonstrated in the exhibition and in Landau’s essay: see Part I of this review.), especially during the period of their closest friendship, when Pollock was gestating his famous drip style. In other words, there is reason to believe that Katz, following Leja, is pointing in the right direction, at least in respect to Bergsonian ideas, which could possibly have become fused with the Theosophical and Jungian notions Pollock absorbed earlier in life.

As Ellen Landau shows in her rich and lively essay, the connections Pollock made through Lee Krasner were crucial in forming his mature style: Hofmann, Calder, but above all Mercedes and Herbert Matter. The small experimental paintings remain unattributed, and material evidence is negative in respect to some of them. The investigation they have stimulated, on the other hand, has been extremely fruitful, and we now understand much more about the origins of Pollock’s drip technique. Mercedes is in many ways an extremely appealing artist and woman, while Herbert emerges as the hero of the story—a brilliant artistic polymath who is as influential today as he was during his lifetime. Ultimately the little paintings, with their occasionally packed interweavings of dripped and daubed skeins of paint, can stand as symbols of the intellectual and personal friendship between the two couples. If they did not collectively intermingle flows of paint, as they may well have done in some cases, they most definitely did intermingle strands of thought and creative energy...dare I say élan vital? (Click here to read Part I)

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1. As Sotheby’s asserts in promoting their educational programs, “...concentrating principally on Old Master paintings, modern art, furniture and ceramics, the MA in Fine and Decorative Art teaches connoisseurship, a skill rarely featured in other academic settings...The defining characteristic of this program is its frequent and regular visits to museums and galleries, the auction house, and country house collections for first-hand observation of art objects. The visual and hands-on approach, supported by a thorough grounding in materials and techniques, gives a firm foundation for postgraduate research and the excitement of unravelling the material culture of the past.”

2. It is interesting to note that if Pollock were a few generations older and unburdened with a foundational posteriority, the storage facility of a close friend and collaborator would be thought to be a reliable source.

3. In fact Sherman Lee, when in 1980 he thought Pollock’s reputation had survived long enough to merit inclusion in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, he deliberately acquired the smallish Number 5 (ca. 54 x 39 in.), as was his custom with the art of that generation.