Pollock scholar rages at new painting proof
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YOU MEDDLING KIDS! Former Jackson Pollock authenticator Francis O-Connor gives scientific investigators a what-for Friday over this painting shown to be a real Pollock.
Photo: Matthew McDermott
A cantankerous Jackson Pollock scholar pounded his cane and angrily refused to accept that the abstract artist had painted a canvas for his mistress just weeks before his 1956 death — despite overwhelming new evidence that he did.
“I don’t think there’s any expert in the world that would look at that piece and say it’s a Pollock,” Francis O’Connor huffed at a forensic conference Friday where experts presented groundbreaking proof that the painting is a Pollock.
“I am not convinced!” railed O’Connor, who had long sided with Pollock’s late wife, Lee Krasner, that the work, “Red, Black & Silver,” wasn’t the real deal.
O’Connor — who headed the Pollock Authentication Board before it was disbanded in 1996 — could barely contain his outrage during the presentation at the “Art From the Ground Up” symposium, sponsored by the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, at Stony Brook Manhattan.
O’Connor, 76, dismissed the findings as “ambiguous science.”
“This is an authentic work that Jackson Pollock painted in 1956,” Colette Loll, an art-fraud expert who has worked for the FBI and Interpol, said as she detailed the investigation for a rapt room of attendees.
The forensic probe, first reported by The Post Thursday, turned up evidence — including human hair, wool fibers, animal hair, beach glass, seeds, and minerals — that pointed to Pollock.
Until her death in 2010, Pollock paramour Ruth Kligman had insisted that her lover had painted the 2-by-2-foot canvas for her on his Springs, NY, lawn one summer afternoon at the height of a scandalous five-month affair that ended when Pollock died in an August 1956 car crash.
But Pollack’s wife — who was in Europe while Kligman was playing house with her husband — and her powerful art-world friends refused to authenticate the piece.
The samples were all triangulated — every sample of beach glass, wool fiber, hair, minerals and seed appeared in the painting, the shoes and the ground of Pollock’s lawn, Loll said.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” said Nick Petraco, a John Jay College forensic expert and former NYPD crime-lab honcho who conducted the testing.
“I’ve been doing this for more than 40 years and all the moons have to line up — the odds of everything [erroneously] coming back a match is astronomical,” he said. “Next to impossible.”
“You put people in jail for life with that kind of evidence,” said artist Jonathan Cramer, a Kligman estate trustee.
“I don’t think there’s any expert in the world that would look at that piece and say it’s a Pollock,” Francis O’Connor huffed at a forensic conference Friday where experts presented groundbreaking proof that the painting is a Pollock.
“I am not convinced!” railed O’Connor, who had long sided with Pollock’s late wife, Lee Krasner, that the work, “Red, Black & Silver,” wasn’t the real deal.
O’Connor — who headed the Pollock Authentication Board before it was disbanded in 1996 — could barely contain his outrage during the presentation at the “Art From the Ground Up” symposium, sponsored by the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, at Stony Brook Manhattan.
O’Connor, 76, dismissed the findings as “ambiguous science.”
“This is an authentic work that Jackson Pollock painted in 1956,” Colette Loll, an art-fraud expert who has worked for the FBI and Interpol, said as she detailed the investigation for a rapt room of attendees.
The forensic probe, first reported by The Post Thursday, turned up evidence — including human hair, wool fibers, animal hair, beach glass, seeds, and minerals — that pointed to Pollock.
Until her death in 2010, Pollock paramour Ruth Kligman had insisted that her lover had painted the 2-by-2-foot canvas for her on his Springs, NY, lawn one summer afternoon at the height of a scandalous five-month affair that ended when Pollock died in an August 1956 car crash.
But Pollack’s wife — who was in Europe while Kligman was playing house with her husband — and her powerful art-world friends refused to authenticate the piece.
The samples were all triangulated — every sample of beach glass, wool fiber, hair, minerals and seed appeared in the painting, the shoes and the ground of Pollock’s lawn, Loll said.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” said Nick Petraco, a John Jay College forensic expert and former NYPD crime-lab honcho who conducted the testing.
“I’ve been doing this for more than 40 years and all the moons have to line up — the odds of everything [erroneously] coming back a match is astronomical,” he said. “Next to impossible.”
“You put people in jail for life with that kind of evidence,” said artist Jonathan Cramer, a Kligman estate trustee.
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