Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

"Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?" can seem to be a "Truth is Stranger than Fiction" documentary. The main antagonists in it (who never meet in person) are too extreme to be plausible in fiction--and, for that matter, Jackson Pollock and his career were also at the boundaries of plausibility.

There is a tough old female big-rig driver and dumpster-diver with an 8th-grade education, Teri Horton, who bought what looks like a Jackson Pollock drip painting as a gift for a friend for $5 is a thrift store. It is too big to fit in the friend's door, and someone tells Horton that if it is indeed a Pollock, it's worth big money.

But, no one is going to pay big money for an unsigned painting with no provenance--and there is no evidence for the painting having gotten from Pollock's cabin/studio to the thrift store. (With the millions of dollars at stake, I'd think more effort would have been made to try to establish the penultimate link.)

Horton (and her son, who owns an automotive repair shop in Laguna Beach, CA) are unable to get any experts even to look at the painting. The establishment Pollock experts (not to mention those who own authenticated Pollocks!) do not want to consider the possibility of there being Pollocks floating about unknown to them. (The reliability of the ledger is seriously undercut, not least by the discovery that Pollock dumped some paintings with which he was dissatisfied in the East Hampton dump.)

Having failed to get any of the gatekeepers even to look at the painting, Horton turns to science. Eventually, the battleground shifts between the gruff and stubborn woman with the unsigned painting vs. the art establishment, to one I find more interesting. She manages to interest (more, I think, is involved than paying) someone with excellent credentials as an authenticator using scientific methods, Peter Paul Biro. In this instance, there is a fingerprint on the back of Horton's painting and links established by chemical analysis to paint on the floor of Pollock's studio. Plus research shows that Pollock allowed practically no one ever to go into his studio.

So, now, it is not the ignorant truck-driver vs. the cognoscenti, but a clash between scientific evidence and "connoisseurship." The latter is represented--with a level of snootiness that would seem too over-the-top in a fiction film--by Thomas Hoving, an egghead whose head really looks like an egg. Horton's painting does not "sing" to him as real Pollocks do, and his contempt for scientific evidence is almost as great as his contempt for amateurs with dreams of fortunes.

Between these extremes, there are characters with doubts, including surviving friends of Pollock who say "I don't think it's one" (rather than "It's preposterous to think it could be one") and Horton's son who urged his mother to take two million dollars for the painting (a rather considerable return on $5).

It is easy to understand Horton's frustration with the closed-off world of "connoisseurs," and to forget that someone willing to pay $25 million not only has a lot of money but as much fear of being duped as she has. It seems to me that the so-called connoisseurs have an interest in rejecting objective evidence, but have a more honorable interest in trying to block wide(r)-spread forgeries. Having such a self-parody of snootiness as Hoving adds to the urge to root for the little guy (gal), the (female) David vs. Goliath. Plus she tells good stories.

I think that she was crazy to reject an offer of $9 million. The painting does not "sing" to her, either! And she could live considerably more comfortably as a multimillionaire, no? By the end of the movie (by the time her other son is singing a ballad of her indefatigability), I was finding her determination not to be swindled somewhat grating, too. (That she resembled Pollock in orneriness and self-destructiveness is underlined multiple times by various observers of her quest.)

Who gets to decide what is art and what particular works are worth are interesting questions that are tangentially addressed here. If I had the money to buy an authentic Pollock, I still wouldn't (which is not to say that I dislike his painting: found the NY MOMA retrospective of them a few years back quite interesting).

As for the immediate question of Horton's painting: based on evidence from the documentary, I think that the painting was probably done by and discarded by Pollock. Thus, it both was painted by him and in a serious sense is not a "Jackson Pollock painting." The lack of a signature on a painting generally decrease its value. Particularly in the case of Pollock, the lack of signature is evidence that the work was a painting that did not satisfy him enough for him to sign, register, and try to sell it. (If he had given it away, I think he'd have signed it for the recipient.)

I realize that there are many who think that all Pollocks are gimmicks for bilking money, that the distinction between a good Pollock and a discard is meaningless, etc. But they are not likely to spend $25 million on one!

© 2007, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD