Fingerprint expert tells Nebraska group about alleged Pollock forgery

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BY LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal Star

An Arizona fingerprint expert says a painting purported to be a Jackson Pollock work worth millions sold last week is a fake.

And Pat Wertheim says he can prove it.

It’s all in the fingerprints, he told a group of investigators and students at a conference of the Nebraska Chapter of the International Association for Identification (NIAI) at Mahoney State Park Wednesday.

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Pat Wertheim, a fingerprint expert from Arizona, talks at Mahoney State Park. (Lori Pilger)

Pat Wertheim, a fingerprint expert from Arizona, talks at Mahoney State Park. (Lori Pilger)

“It’s going to cause quite a stir,”  Wertheim said.

Before his talk, Teri Franks, the woman who hired Wertheim, called him her Wyatt Earp in an art world she describes as a wild frontier where $6 billion a year is lost to art crimes.

She watched from the front row as he started his talk, showing the crowd a picture of a New York couple standing by the four-foot by eight-foot canvas covered with the kinds of drips and spatters for which Pollock was known.

Then, one at a time, he showed images of fingerprints — said to be Pollock’s — from the stretcher frame and back edge of the painting.

They were put there, Wertheim alleges, by the Canadian man who authenticated the painting and were lifted from a paint can at the Jackson Pollock Museum on Long Island, N.Y.

He said the man made $50,000 authenticating it and the New York owners likely several times more when they sold it last week as a Pollock. He said he doesn’t know the selling price, but an original about the same size sold for $140 million a few years ago.

Plus, nobody knows for sure if the print on the paint can was Pollock’s, he said. He’s tried to find a record of his prints to compare it to, but hasn’t had any luck.

“Bottom  line: Is it a Jackson Pollock or not?” a woman asked.

Wertheim’s short answer? “No. It’s not a Jackson Pollock.”

Wertheim, who started working in law enforcement in 1973, says the painting’s previous owner said she had met the painter and it wasn’t Pollock.  And the paint? It’s acrylic, Wertheim said, which he contends didn’t exist in Pollock’s lifetime.

Then there’s the fingerprints, which Wertheim said screams forgery. He points out how the prints are jagged, not round, like prints in real life. And how they have the same little chunks missing. How they all look so alike and line up when the images are overlapped. How they’re all the same part of the print.

“The conclusion for me was inescapable,” he said. “Those prints had to be forgeries.”

Last October, Wertheim said he broke the news to the owners that the painting in question wasn’t a Pollock and alleges they told him they never believed it was real.

On Tuesday night, he put his report online and suspects he’ll go to court one day to defend it if a case is brought against the sellers by the painting’s new owners.

He says it’s the first fingerprint forgery of its kind that he’s come across in years. (He noted a case from 1946 in which a burglar in  Czechoslovakia worked as a fortune teller, took imprints of fingers and then left molds on safes he broke into.)

Some might question the science behind Wertheim’s conclusion or if it would be admissible in court, But Wertheim says years of research have made him an expert in a technical field.

Fingerprint forgery was used as a plot device as far back as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and in movies like “The Bourne Identity,” but it just doesn’t happen in real life, Wertheim said.

Years ago, he recalled, his dad picked up a Life magazine and laughed while reading a story about Pollock. Maybe he should quit his job, nail down a dropcloth and splatter paint around. They’d be rich, his dad joked.

Now, Wertheim said, here he is 50-some years later dealing with a Pollock.

He said he wonders about other “Pollock” paintings authenticated by the same man, like one in 2006 that had been  bought by a woman for $5 in a San Bernardino thrift shop in the early 1990s. Wertheim said he’s heard the man has authenticated two others, too.

Wertheim doesn’t name the authenticator, but it’s not hard to figure out he’s talking about Peter Paul Biro. Biro is a forensic art expert the San Bernadino woman used to authenticate her “Pollock.” His work was included in a documentary about the woman’s efforts to prove the painting’s origin.

Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.