Jackson Pollock Curse

Taylor's expertise in fractals was a key element in the authentication of 32 works said to be painted by Jackson Pollock.

Taylor first saw images of paintings by Pollock when he was a child. Pollock became famous in the 1940s for upending conventional concepts about painting, when he began pouring paint directly from the can onto canvases on the floor, resulting in "vast, tangled webs of paint," as Taylor writes in an essay in the Winter 2010 issue of Oregon Quarterly.

After Taylor went on to become a physicist and specialize in fractals, he was reminded of Pollock’s  paintings. As a scientist, "when I looked at his paintings, I noticed that the paint splatters seemed to spread across his canvases like the flow of electricity through our devices," he writes. Using software designed for detecting fractals in electronic devices, he then determined that Pollock's work was filled with fractal patterns.

This made Taylor an expert in authentication. And thus when the 32 possible Pollock's were found, Taylor was asked to lend his scientific expertise to the enterprise. Millions of dollars were at stake, and what followed involved rumor, innuendo, media madness, New York art world political posturing and the threat of litigation. In short: the Pollock curse.

Read Taylor's essay in the Winter 2010 issue of Oregon Quarterly. His essay was a finalist in the 2010 Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest.

Taylor is also a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists sponsored by Improbable Research, the same folks responsible for the Ig Nobel prizes.