Chestnut Hill, Mass. – The tiny McMullen Museum of Art, tucked across from the admissions office in Boston College’s Devlin Hall, is free to visitors and closes between shows. The nearest it has come to courting controversy in its 14-year history was a 1999 Irish art exhibition that featured a photographic portrait of an artist wearing nothing but a condom.
But this September, due to an unlikely series of events, the McMullen will be the first museum in the country to display a hotly disputed collection of works that may or may not have been painted by abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Museum officials won’t say how many people they expect to draw to the campus, or whether they think “Pollock Matters” will break an attendance record set in 1999 for an exhibition featuring a rarely seen Caravaggio painting. Still, months before opening, word of the show is spreading among art historians, who say they’re pleased a museum with the McMullen’s reputation will display the controversial works.
Mark Bessire, director of the Bates College Museum of Art, said he was surprised the McMullen, known for scholarly exhibitions on the painter Edvard Munch and surrealist Roberto Matta, would host the show.
“It’s definitely taking a risk, and exciting for them to be taking that risk,” he said. “And because they have such integrity, I think it’s great for them.”
The risk comes with entering what one Pollock historian describes as a “swamp” – the debate over the paintings New York filmmaker Alex Matter found five years ago in a locker rented by his late father, Herbert, labeled as works by Pollock.
“This whole question of Pollock attributions, and the different reasons for believing or not believing, is so complicated,” says Pepe Karmel, a New York University professor who co-curated a Pollock show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998. “It is so highly subjective, and personal investments are so high on both sides of the issue that it’s hard to have a rational discussion on this subject.”
Two key Pollock scholars who publicly questioned the Matter pictures, Francis O’Connor and Eugene Thaw, no longer do interviews. Ellen Landau, a Pollock historian who believes they are authentic, now refers questions to her publicist.
Meanwhile, McMullen director Nancy Netzer is learning how difficult it will be to pull the show together. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which owns the copyrights on reproductions of the artist’s works, informed her this month that it will not allow the McMullen to use photographs of Pollock’s work in the exhibition’s catalog or in galleries.
Netzer says she’s not taking sides. She just wants the controversial paintings to be seen.
“We’re not in this for any other reason except that we believe that this is an important, scholarly research project,” Netzer said from her office recently. “We’d be happy to put this on if there wasn’t this firestorm. We’re not looking for publicity.”
