Jackson Pollock trove announced

The son of two artists who were friends and contemporaries of Jackson Pollock has announced that 32 previously unrecorded works by Pollock were found among his late parents’ belongings.

Alex Matter -- son of photographer, filmmaker and graphic designer Herbert Matter and abstract painter Mercedes Matter -- said through a spokeswoman that the 32 artworks were discovered a little more than two years ago in a wrapped package in Herbert Matter’s storage space on Long Island.

The spokeswoman, Ellen Anderson, said Tuesday that Alex Matter did not announce the discovery until now because of intermittent ill health and because the pieces required cleaning and stabilization.

The works, ranging from 5-by-7 inches to 16-by-17 1/2 inches, date from 1946 to 1949. They include 22 mixed-media “drip” paintings on boards as well as drawings. None of the pieces is signed, although three bear the artist’s initials.

Ellen Landau, a Case Western Reserve University humanities professor who has written a book on Pollock, said five or six of the pieces are unfinished.

Landau said she believes Pollock did not sign the works because he never planned to exhibit them but that they bear unmistakable characteristics of his style. “Their provenance is excellent,” she said.

Landau, who co-curated a retrospective of the works of Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, in the late 1980s, said she has been asked by the Matter family to organize a touring exhibition including the recently discovered pieces, plus works by Herbert and Mercedes Matter.