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Public Affairs Discussion Group
"The Pollack Pictures Firestorm"
February 2, 2007
Crawford Hall, Room 9 - The Inamori Center
12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
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Harsh Mathur, Ph.D. - Associate
Professor of Physics
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Kate Jones Smith - Graduate Student Department of
Physics |
Dear Colleagues:
This Friday's Public Affairs Discussion Group
will meet in an entirely new venue. We will be in
room 9 in the basement of Crawford Hall, a part of
the newly established Inamori International Center
of Ethics and Excellence. We assemble at 12:30 and
run until 1:30.
Most of you may have read about the controversy over
a collection of 32 paintings and drawings attributed
to Jackson Pollock which surfaced in 2005. If
authentic these pieces would be worth millions, if
not hundreds of millions of dollars in the current
art market. The last time a Pollock canvas went on
the auction block it was reportedly knocked down for
over $140 million―one painting. That's enough to
see this university easily through its current
financial woes.
To protect their investments and to
try to arrive at a definitive determination as to
the authenticity of these pieces the Pollock-Krasner
Foundation hired a physicist from the University of
Oregon, Richard Taylor, to examine them and
particularly to see if these works were consistent
with the complex patterns known as fractals in
Pollock's artwork. In February 2006 Taylor reported
his findings that none of the six paintings he
examined had Pollock's distinctive fractal
hallmarks. Bombshell #1.
Meanwhile, a physics graduate
student at CWRU, Kate Jones-Smith, had uncovered
what she sees as major flaws in Taylor's
methodology. Encouraged by Professor Harsh Mathur,
she and he published collaboratively their findings.
In short, they found other flaws in Taylor's work
and also that even some of her own scribbles that
Jones-Smith ran through the Taylor model exhibited
the same fractals attributed to Pollock's work.
Bombshell #2.
Coincidently, Professor Ellen Landau of Art History,
an expert on Pollock, independently had viewed the
paintings and said that she thought that they were
authentic. So CWRU is knee deep in this debate. The
plot thickens.
On Friday, Kate Jones-Smith and
Harsh Mathur will join us to discuss their work and
to describe how they landed in this firestorm. This
is one of those delicious projects that transcends
disciplinary boundaries and is ready made for our
public affairs forum. Of what utility is fractal
analysis, indeed what is fractal analysis, and how
can it be applied to the study of art? Are there
other analytical tools from physics and from the
other physical sciences that might be used by art
historians and the students of the other arts? The
stakes are high in this particular debate, and the
issues ramify throughout the academic and economic
world.
Joe White will be out of town and so Ken Grundy
(Political Science Emeritus) will chair this
session. Come prepared for a wide ranging discussion
and for the coffee and beverages and cookies, our
regular fare. Bring your own lunch if you desire.
Best regards,
Joe White
More About Our Guest
Harsh Mathur's main interest has been in the
propagation of waves in random media, particularly
electrons in dirty conductors. This is an old subject
--- important results were obtained by Lord Rayleigh in
the nineteenth century. Nonetheless significant advances
have been made in the last two decades with the
formulation of localization theory and the discovery of
a new kind of universal behavior. The common feature of
these phenomena is interference on length scales long
compared to the mean free path.
Localization refers to interference corrections to
the incoherent transmission of a wave through a random
medium. In dirty conductors this is manifested as a
growing resistance at low temperature. Under appropriate
conditions interference can produce a transition or
crossover from metallic to insulating behavior.
Harsh Mathur's and his collaborators have
investigated the modulation of localization by electric
fields. By coupling to the spin-phase of the electron's
wave function, strong electric fields produce a dramatic
effect known as antilocalization in which the sign of
the localization effect is changed. There approach
provides a clear understanding of this phenomenon and
may help extract material properties from
magneto-resistance measurements.
With colleagues from AT&T Bell Laboratories Harsh
Mathur is now studying localization in Si MOSFETs, the
basic building blocks of modern semiconductor
electronics. The purpose of this is to probe the
roughness of the semiconductor-oxide interface to which
mobile electrons are confined. This is important because
interface roughness limits device performance and
further miniaturization. There is a second motivation to
study this system: due to the roughness a uniform
magnetic field applied in the interface plane behaves
like a random field. Motion in a plane in a random
magnetic field is of fundamental interest: it is
relevant to both the Quantum Hall system and high
temperature superconductors.
The electronic energy levels of a small metallic
particle illustrate universality: their statistical
properties --- for example, the distribution of level
spacings --- are the same for all samples regardless of
details such as sample composition or the nature and
density of impurities. The universality is reflected in
the conductance and thermodynamic properties of metallic
grains at low temperature --- Harsh Mathur and his
co-workers, for example, have investigated their
spin-magnetism theoretically. Although this universal
behavior was discovered in context of electron-waves, it
is a general wave phenomenon: similar physics underlies
laser speckle. Harsh Mathur is currently exploring the
possible application of these ideas to indoor wireless
propagation. Another subject of interest is the
geometric phase. Such phases arise in diverse contexts:
examples range from the ability of a cat or a diver to
re-orient in free-fall by changing shape to the phase
accumulation of a slowly driven quantum system. The
common feature of these problems is the use of gauge
fields to describe the geometric phase. My interest is
in characterizing the kinds of gauge fields that can
arise geometrically. For example, together with R.
Shankar, Harsh Mathur recently showed that quantum
systems with a two-fold degeneracy support a gauge field
configuration called the meron. In addition Harsh Mathur
is interested in chaos, and the physics of ultra-small
devices and structures.
Can mathematics explain the art of Jackson Pollock?
Can it be used to authenticate paintings of uncertain
provenance? Case Western Reserve University physicists
address these questions in next week's edition of
Nature.
Case physics doctoral student Kate Jones-Smith first
encountered these questions in December 2004 when
preparing for a weekly astrophysics seminar .
Jones-Smith performed a Google search that linked her to
research by University of Oregon physicist Richard
Taylor and collaborators, who claim that Jackson
Pollock's famous drip paintings, are fractals. Fractals
are complex geometric shapes that have been studied by
mathematicians since the 1970s.
In articles that appeared in scientific journals and
news magazines including Nature, Physics World
and Scientific American, Taylor and coworkers
also claim that fractal analysis can be used to
distinguish Pollock's drip paintings from imitations.
Intrigued, Jones-Smith began to examine Taylor's
articles, but quickly found that the work was
seriously flawed She showed that doodles that she
could make in minutes using Adobe Photoshop were as
fractal as any Pollock drip painting, vividly
refuting Taylor's claim that Pollock was able to
generate fractals by hand only because he had
attained a mastery of chaotic motion.
Jones-Smith presented a pointed critique of
Taylor's work to Case astrophysicists and was
encouraged to write up her critique for publication.
But since Taylor's original work had appeared in
Nature five years earlier, she thought interest in
the topic had waned.
That changed this February when Taylor was
invited by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to
determine the authenticity of paintings recently
found by Alex Matter, son of the late photographer
Herbert Matter. According to Matter, a close
personal friend of Pollock's, the paintings are the
work of Pollock, but Taylor used fractal analysis to
pronounce them inauthentic.
Convinced now that her work might still be of
interest, Jones-Smith developed her critique into
the article, Revisiting Pollock's Drip Paintings,
co-authored with Harsh Mathur, Case professor of
physics.
A key element of the paper is a painting called
Untitled 5 that Jones-Smith created in a
matter of minutes in Photoshop. Untitled 5
depicts a field of stars and looks like the kind of
drawing the proud mother of a three-year old might
stick on a refrigerator door, says Jones-Smith. But,
according to the fractal authentication criteria
that Taylor has made public, it is an authentic
Pollock.
Jones-Smith adds, "I found I can
make paintings at will in Photoshop that meet all
the criteria he has made public."
A defining feature of fractals is their
self-similarity: They look the same if magnified.
Sometimes the self-similarity is visible to the eye,
as in the famous Koch snowflake, which is composed
of a hierarchy of ever smaller equilateral
triangles. More often the self-similarity is
statistical and can be detected only by computer
analysis using a technique called box-counting.
In their
Nature article, Jones-Smith and Mathur
show that Pollock's works lack the range of scales
needed to be considered fractal in the sense of
box-counting analysis. This is because typically the
smallest marks of paint are only a thousand times
smaller than the entire canvas.
The researchers show that considering Pollock's
paintings to be fractal actually leads to
mathematical contradictions and inconsistencies.
"Not only does Taylor state Pollock's paintings are
fractal," said Jones-Smith, "but he goes further and
says such things as this is why Pollock is such a
master―that he had mastered the language of nature."
The Case researchers' findings, particularly
their painting Untitled 5, do not support
this contention. Jones-Smith and Mathur also note
that Taylor has analyzed only 17 out of more than
180 drip paintings made by Pollock. Aside from the
other problems with his analysis, the Case
physicists contend that 17 paintings are too small a
sample to provide an adequate basis for some of
Taylor's inferences.
Adding to the unfolding drama of this research is
that while Jones-Smith was preparing for her
December 2004 seminar, on the other side of campus-
unbeknownst to the physicists- Ellen Landau, Case
professor of art history, and one of the world's
foremost experts on Pollock, was studying the
paintings discovered by Alex Matter. Jones-Smith and
Mathur learnt about Landau's work only this February
by reading about it in a newspaper article.
Immediately they contacted her to tell her about
their research.
"Once Harsh contacted me, I collaborated with him
and Kate, providing them with in-depth information
on Jackson Pollock and his working methods useful to
their project," said Landau. "I am pleased they have
successfully refuted Richard Taylor's thesis and
that it will be published in Nature.
Irrespective of whatever determination is ultimately
made on the authenticity of the recently found
Matter paintings, fractal analysis should not be
considered a foolproof technique for authenticating
works by Pollock. The fact that Taylor has refused
to fully share his testing criteria casts further
doubt on the credibility of his claims."
Jones-Smith concurs, noting that the main
implication of her work for the Matter paintings is
that fractal analysis should not be part of the
debate regarding their authenticity
(story courtesy of Susan Griffiths)
Spring Semester
Schedule
Beginning on February 2, the Friday Lunch will
move back to Crawford Hall, in ROOM 9. Room 9 is within
the Inamori Center, on the basement level of Crawford.
It is very kind of Bill Deal, Director of the Inamori
Center, to make this room available on a regular basis.
Thank you, Bill!
Room 9 seats 35, with a central table and also chairs
along the wall. It should be a better setup than
Guilford. If we expect a large crowd, we may be able to
open a partition and join up with Room 11.
There will, however, be a class in the room until 12:20.
Therefore it will not be possible to get there much
before the lunch begins. On the other hand, people who
are a bit early should be able to hang out in the
Tomlinson food court. I believe the underground passage
from Tomlinson to Crawford will be restored when
construction is finished.
Coffee will be provided from the SAGES Cafe'. Which
should mean very good coffee.
The tentative schedule of speakers, so far:
January 26: Phil (Perkins Professor of
Physics-Case Western Reserve University) and Sarah
Taylor, Wind Power and All of It's Aspects -
Environmental, Energy, Economic, Aesthetic, and
Maybe More.
February 2: Ken Grundy, Marcus Hanna Professor
Emeritus of Political Science, on subject to be
determined
February 9: Paul Schroeder, Visiting Lecturer in
Political Science and from Families of the Fallen for
Change, on what to do in Iraq
February 16: Mark Turner, Professor of Cognitive
Science, on cognition and politics
February 23: Mel Goldstein, Professor of
Anthropology, on why the Chinese are winning in Tibet
March 2: Susan Helper, Professor of Economics, on
strategies for American workers within the current
global competition.
March 9: Baiju Shah, President, Bioenterprise
Corporation, on the new economic prospects in Cleveland.
March 16: Break
March 23: Mike Aronoff of Cuyahoga County on the
evaluation of sexual predators for the courts―are they
really dangerous, and can we predict if they will reoffend?
March 30: Barbara Morrison, Assistant Professor
of Nursing, on how current patterns of care for Moms and
newborns deny them the peace and quiet and bonding they
need.
April 6: Open
April 13: Marixa Lasso, Assistant Professor of
History: Drugs, War, and Coffee in Colombia
April 20: Mark Joseph, Assistant Professor,
Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences: Mixed-Income
Development as an Approach to Addressing Urban Poverty
April 27: Christine Cano, Associate Professor of
French, on the French elections (this date falls between
the first round and the runoff election)
Parking: For
those people who seek to make special arrangements about
parking, the contact person now will be Fay Alexander.
Her phone number is 368-4440, and her e-mail is
fabrienne.alexander@case.edu.
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