- But when the conservators started to study these layers with X-rays and ultraviolet lights, certain portions of the canvas didn’t resemble Pollock’s style of painting at all. The texture was different, suggesting repetitive brush strokes not seen elsewhere in his work.
- Another kind of paint was used in these areas too, one that “didn’t have the typical characteristics of poured house paint that we know Pollock used”... The style of painting...had a kind of “fussiness that has nothing to do with the way Pollock applied paint.”
- [The conservators]...then took microscopic paint samples from various parts of the canvas. They found household enamel paint known to have been used by Pollock, but they also discovered a synthetic resin that Pollock was not known to have used.
- How had it gotten there? Records showed that nobody at the museum had touched the painting since it entered MoMA’s collection in 1968. And there was no evidence that it had been restored before coming to MoMA.
Read this fascinating detective story (by Carol Vogel in the NYT) here.
