Who the Fuck Is Jackson Pollock?

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Who the Fuck Is Jackson Pollock?
Promotional movie poster for the film
Directed by	Harry Moses
Produced by	Don Hewitt Steven Hewitt Michael Lynne
Starring	Teri Horton Peter Paul Biro
Release date(s)	November 9, 2006
Language	English
IMDb profile

Who the Fuck Is Jackson Pollock? (usually displayed as Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? due to the profanity in the title) is a documentary following a woman named Teri Horton, a 73 year old former long-haul truck driver from California, who purchased a painting from a thrift shop for $5, later to find out that it may be a Jackson Pollock painting.^[1]

According to an interview from the film, Horton purchased the painting from a California thrift shop as a gag gift for a friend.^[2] When the dinner-table-sized painting proved too large to fit into her friend's trailer, Horton set it out among other items at a yard sale, where a local art teacher spotted it and suggested that the work could have been painted by Pollock due to the similarity to his action painting technique. The film depicts Horton's attempts to authenticate and sell the painting as an original work by Pollock. The authenticity is difficult to establish because the painting was purchased at a thrift store, is unsigned, and without provenance, the documentation of a painting’s history.

Some art connoisseurs, including Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, believe the painting to be inauthentic, while others, such as Nick Carone, an artist and friend of Pollock’s, is uncertain. Teri hires Peter Paul Biro, a forensic specialist, who matched a partial fingerprint on the canvas to a fingerprint on a can of paint in Pollock’s studio and to fingerprints on two authenticated Pollock canvases. Additionally, he matched, through an analysis of paint particles in Pollock's studio compared to paint from the canvas in question, the paint on the canvas to paint used in Pollock's studio. She also involves Tod Volpe, an art dealer previously convicted of defrauding his clients, who invests in the painting as a means of recuperating his reputation and financial solvency.

Both Volpe and Biro are involved together in a business venture to manage and sell works of art with ambiguous or questionable authenticity. Volpe and Biro are listed as consultants in the film's credits. Volpe approached producer Steven Hewitt, who, along with executive producer Don Hewitt (creator of 60 Minutes), had formed the Hewitt Group to produce documentaries. Harry Moses,^[3] an Emmy, Peabody, and Directors Guild of America award-winner, and a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, is the film's other producer, as well as its director and writer.

Horton, who appeared on The Montel Williams Show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the Late Show with David Letterman with the painting, once turned down an offer of US $9 million for it.^[3]

[edit] References

^ [1] Deiner, Paige Lauren. "Woman’s quest to authenticate Pollock art riveting." The Monitor. 12 July 2007.
^ [2] Scheib, Ronnie. "Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?" Variety 15 November 2006
^ ^a ^b Randy Kennedy (November 9, 2006). Could Be a Pollock; Must Be a Yarn. The New York Times. “The filmmakers were initially fascinated by the science-versus-art angle of Ms. Horton’s story, about how forensics may be starting to nudge the entrenched tradition of connoisseurship from its perch in the world of art authentication. But as they spent more time with her, they began to see the movie as being about something more important than whether the painting was a real Pollock, a question left very much for the viewer to decide. “It became, really, a story about class in America,” Mr. Moses said. “It’s a story of the art world looking down its collective nose at this woman with an eighth-grade education.”