New Doubts Raised About Pollock Paintings

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The three paintings are part of a lot of 32 Pollocks whose authenticity already sparked a heated debate among experts last year.

The trio in question was wrapped in brown paper indicating they dated between 1946 and 1949.

But a study by experts of Harvard University Art Museums found that pigments in the three emerged long after the "drip" painting master's death in a car crash in 1956. An analysis found that a pigment in orange paint in one canvas was not available until 1971, while the brown paint in another was only developed in the early 1980s.

“We've found materials in all three that were problematic if the work would be by Pollock," Narayan Khandekar, senior conservation scientist at the Harvard art museums analytical laboratory, told the AFP.

The abstract paintings are small, about 16-by-8-inches, and were only identified by codes.

The 32 paintings were discovered in 2002 by Alex Matter, the son of a Pollock friend who had kept them in storage.

Matter, who authorized the paintings' analysis, rejected the findings. He said some of the works were found in bad shape and had been restored.

"A number of leading Pollock scholars have examined the paintings discovered by Alex Matter through a range of methods from technical analysis to connoisseurship," read a statement from a public relations firm representing Matter. Many attribute them to Jackson Pollock and nothing in the Harvard report effectively challenges that. The authentification of works of art is still more art than science."

In 2006, a University of Oregon physics professor, Robert Taylor, questioned the authenticity of the 32 paintings by employing fractal analysis, the identification of patterns amid apparent chaos.

Through his analysis, Taylor has found that Pollock's iconic drip paintings contain a unique stylistic fingerprint. But none of the 32 paintings found by Matter obeyed the fractal geometry he had observed in Pollock's work.

His conclusions were contested by a widely respected Pollock authority, Ellen Landau, who had found the paintings to be genuine.

Landau on Tuesday challenged the Harvard scientists' findings. "If someone other than Pollock did do these paintings, he or she had an amazing knowledge of Pollock's working methods," Landau said in a statement.

Pollock would lay canvases on the floor or up against a wall and pour paint over them, creating abstract, fractal traces overlaying each other. One of his paintings recently sold for a record $140 million at a private sale in New York.

Landau said the pigments used by Pollock were given to him by his brother-in-law, Robi Rebetez, owner of a furniture store in Basel, Switzerland. She said she would research patent dates for the pigments in Switzerland.

"Just because a pigment wasn't patented in the USA doesn't mean that it was not available in Switzerland or Germany," she said.