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Ms. Horton, the farthest thing from an art-world aesthete, had never heard of Pollock when she purchased a canvas she describes as so ugly that she tried to give it away to a friend (“We were going to throw darts at it,” she recalls), but it wouldn’t fit through the door of her friend’s trailer. At a garage sale a local art teacher spotted the painting and suggested it might be a Pollock. Her curiosity whetted, Ms. Horton began calling Los Angeles art dealers. Her son, Bill Page, joined the search, which became a decade-long quest for validation of her purchase.
As this smart, hard-bitten woman with an eighth-grade education pursues her quest, the documentary portrays the debate between connoisseurship and science as a culture war. Among the connoisseurs who insist that a refined eye is the ultimate judge of authenticity is Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, exuding contempt and superciliousness. He is the most outspoken in his rejection. Shown the painting, he dismisses it as “pretty, superficial and frivolous.”