Have you seen my Jackson Pollock?
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I lost my Jackson Pollock.
The last time I saw the painting was in the basement of my parents’ Massachusetts house, sometime in the 1970s. Perhaps it disappeared because it was modest in size -- canvas board, maybe 18 inches by 24 inches, max -- but then again, it was brightly colored and hard to miss. The enamel drips were mostly turquoise, red, yellow and black, with flashy threads of silver.
My colleague Suzanne Muchnic has now reported on a previously unknown group of undocumented paintings attributed to Pollock going on public display Saturday. My missing painting is unlikely to be among them.
From time to time, such works do come to light. In 2002, Alex Matter found 32 previously unknown maybe-Pollocks, said to have been made in a Midtown Manhattan studio his father had lent to Jackson in the late 1940s. Then Teri Horton, 73, a former long-haul trucker with a salty tongue bought a big drip painting at a San Bernardino thrift shop and set out to prove its authenticity. (Neither has been
successful in confirming the attributions.) Now, Erich Gabor Neumeth, 89, a former New York art restorer retired in Lodi, just south of Sacramento, says he has 17 maybe-Pollocks, given to him in payment of a debt some time in the 1960s.
That date is why my painting cannot be among them, since I know mine was still in New England in the 1970s. I made my Pollock myself around 1961 or 1962, when I was about 11, in a Saturday morning art class at the local YMCA. The teacher had us produce a painting in several different genres, such as a Dutch still life and an Impressionist landscape. Modern art was our very last class, and we all made little Pollock drip paintings.
Those were the cultured days of Camelot, so I imagine kids were making Pollocks in YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs all over America. There must have been a mimeographed lesson plan, since the small mill town where I grew up was hardly a cosmopolitan place. And, since Modern art was (and pretty much still is) commonly (if erroneously) regarded as something a child could do, I’m not surprised that dusty maybe-Pollocks are turning up with some regularity 40-plus years on.
What’s surprising is not that it’s happening, but that it’s not happening more often. The week-long show that opens Saturday is at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school whose motto is, ‘God First.’ So who knows? Because it will certainly take a miracle for these paintings to be from the hand of Jackson Pollock.
-- Christopher Knight
