Load of Pollocks!

Retired female truck driver Teri Horton paid $US5 for a paint-splattered canvas at a Californian junk shop in 1991 for a joke. But the joke may be on the art world.

A fingerprint found on the painting has raised the possibility that the artwork is a masterpiece by Jackson Pollock.

If accepted as authentic, the junk-shop picture would be worth up to $US50 million. Pollock's No5, 1948 sold last month for $US140 million, a world record.

Ms Horton, 74, of Newport Beach, had never heard of Pollock. When told her painting might be by the abstract expressionist, she asked: "Who the fuck is Jackson Pollock?"

Ms Horton bought the 120cm by 165cm picture in San Bernardino. She and a friend had a good laugh over it. "We were going to throw darts at it, but we sat there and drank beer and never did get around to it."

Months later, to clear out her clutter, she offered it for sale to friends.

An art professor told her she might have a painting by Pollock, who died in 1956.

The non-profit International Foundation for Art Research rejects the idea that the painting is a Pollock. Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum, who investigated the claim for the documentary, believes it was done as a lark. "I think somebody had a house in some sunny part of the world, Palm Beach or something like that, and wanted an abstract painting, maybe like a Pollock, in colours that would have fit the room."

But Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal art restorer, says he has matched a fingerprint on the painting to a fingerprint on a paint can in Pollock's studio in East Hampton, New York.

"Since Pollock was known to work alone and had no assistants or pupils, the probability of the fingerprint on the blue paint can being Pollock's is very high," he said.

He then sought to match the fingerprint on what he calls "Teri's Find" to a Pollock work of undisputed provenance. In September he discovered what he says is a second matching print on Naked Man with Knife, one of six Pollocks in the Tate Modern's collection in London.

"The new data now firmly identifies Jackson Pollock as the contributor of the fingerprint on the blue paint can as well as on the Horton submission."

Good story, whether it is a Pollock or not.

To create your own Pollock, go here..