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‘Pollock’ may fetch a pretty packet

By John Kipphoff
BLOOMBERG
Wednesday, Nov 19, 2008, Page 15

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A start-up gallery along Toronto’s beachfront, defying the global credit crisis, is asking US$50 million for a disputed Jackson Pollock painting bought for US$5 at a California thrift shop in 1992.

Teri Horton, a retired US truck driver, bought the piece as a joke for a depressed friend before realizing it may be the work of one of America’s most famous artists. After failing to find an American gallery or auction house willing to sell it, she hooked up with the Gallery Delisle in Toronto.

“This is a great chance for Canada,” gallery owner Michelle Delisle said. “There’s no question this is a Pollock. It’s a class thing — if Teri were a Harvard grad or a blue blood, the painting would have found its way into Sotheby’s or a museum already.”

The Pollock sale comes as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression spreads to art. In New York auctions this month at Sotheby’s and Christie’s International, as many as a third of works remained unsold, and prices fell short of estimates.

Christie’s, the biggest auction house, sold US$113.6 million of contemporary works on Nov. 12, half its presale low estimate. Almost a third of 75 lots found no buyers in a room that included tennis player John McEnroe, actress Salma Hayek and billionaire Eli Broad. Among the rejects was a self-portrait by Francis Bacon that Christie’s had estimated would sell for about US$40 million.

Delisle, who opened her gallery in May, began showing the painting over the weekend and will keep it on exhibit until Friday. Bids will be accepted at any time.

She first learned about the work from a 2006 documentary, Who the ##&% is Jackson Pollock, which chronicles Horton’s struggle to have her Pollock authenticated by US experts. Horton, who originally thought the painting was ugly and had planned to throw darts at it, says the US art establishment doesn’t deserve the work.

“I don’t trust them — they all want a piece of the painting,” said Horton, 76, who has rejected offers of US$2 million and US$9 million.

Pollock, a US pioneer of 20th-century abstract expressionism, is best known for his postwar canvases of paint drips and swirls. The biggest collection of his works is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Horton hired a Montreal art restorer, Peter Paul Biro, who used digital imaging and the help of a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer to match a fingerprint on the back of the piece to that on a paint can in the artist’s East Hampton studio.

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Inc neither endorses nor refutes the painting’s authenticity, according to Horton and Delisle. Kerrie Buitrago, a Pollock-Krasner executive in New York, declined to comment in an e-mail.

“It’s not the role of the foundation to authenticate,” said Joan Washburn, 78, of New York’s Washburn Gallery, which represents, among others, the estate of Jackson Pollock, who died in 1956 at the age of 44. “I’m surprised it has showed up in Canada. That painting’s been around for ages. It’s highly unlikely that it would have turned up in a thrift shop.”

The US$50 million price for Horton’s painting is “reasonable,” given that another Pollock was sold for US$140 million in 2006 to a Mexican buyer, Delisle said. She expects an investor looking to “park” cash, rather than a collector, to scoop it up, and predicts the buyer will be Canadian. The work may fetch a third more in a few years, she said.

The sluggish art market may post less of an obstacle for Delisle than concerns about the painting’s origins, said David Silcox, president of Sotheby’s in Canada.

“The market’s down appreciably, but it’s not as bad as thought,” Silcox said. “In Canada there are certainly people who could afford US$50 million, but they’d not go near it if there’s a whisper of doubt about the authenticity.’’

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