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A just issued preliminary report from Thomas Hanley, Chief of Police in Middlebury, Vermont, and veteran fingerprint examiner with close to 30 years experience in fingerprint identification, casts doubts on Paul Biro’s claims of proving “authenticity” of a possible Pollock painting belonging to the Parker family of Long Island. Biro claimed that the “Jackson Pollock fingerprint” he found on the back of the Parkers’ painting was “the same print as the one on Teri Horton’s painting.” Biro’s much media-hyped work on the Horton painting has been withheld from peer scrutiny by Horton and Biro.
On July 8th and 9th 2007, Thomas Hanley, retained by Fine Art Registry, visited the Parkers on Long Island and the Pollock Krasner House in East Hampton. He was accompanied by Fine Art Registry CEO Theresa Franks, professional photographer, Georgianna Lane, videographer David Phillips and Legal Correspondent, Cindy Hill. Also present at the Parkers was retired Detective Sergeant Larry Rooney, another veteran fingerprint expert with 27 years experience in fingerprint ID. Chief Hanley examined the Parkers’ painting, located a number of fingerprints and other items, and photographs were taken. At the Pollock Krasner House, he examined all the paint cans and other items mentioned by Biro in his report on “Teri’s Find” and photographed the fingerprints used by Biro in his “authentication,” as well as others he found.
Preliminary reports have been prepared. The fingerprint claimed by Biro to be a match of the one found on the paint can in the Pollock Krasner House (according to him, the same fingerprint he found on Teri Horton’s painting) struck the fingerprint experts who saw it in the same way: it does not look like any fingerprint that has been on a piece of wood for 50 years and it does not appear to have been made evident by any of the usual methods used by fingerprint experts to expose prints for identification. Biro states in his “Authentication Report” to the Parkers in October 2005, “The search for fingerprints was slow and difficult however it did yield one usable fingerprint that is reproduced here. It was barely visible to the naked eye appearing faint and dull; however with the application of a resin mixture the fingerprint now stands out and is easily recognizable.” This fingerprint is on the wood of the stretcher, not on the canvas.
Thomas Hanley said, “With no known exemplar of Jackson Pollock’s fingerprints, there is no way to know whose print that is on the back of the stretcher of the Ken Parker painting. We can be reasonably sure, however, that this print is not over 50 years old. Bare wood is a poor surface to hold prints, even in the short term, let alone for half a century, and given the history of this painting and its storage and handling as we know it, it is unlikely a residual print of this quality could last that long.”
Thomas Hanley’s preliminary reports can be read in full on the Fine Art Registry website along with the full story of the Parkers’ painting and their quest for authentication.
Chief Hanley is in the process of examining all the photos of the fingerprints in great detail and will publish a second report of his full findings as soon as he has completed the investigation. His work so far indicates that there are definite concerns about Biro’s methods and conclusions which led to his “authenticating” the painting as a Pollock. The Parkers paid Biro a substantial amount of money for his work in restoring and “authenticating” the painting. “We will continue our examination with the specimens we photographed and conduct our own comparison with other prints. Regardless of the result, to render a definitive conclusion as to whose prints these are, without a known exemplar, is nothing more than supposition,” said Thomas Hanley.
Theresa Franks, CEO of Fine Art Registry, said, “FAR retained respected fingerprint examiner Chief Thomas Hanley to check into Biro’s work after one of our members felt that the much publicized Teri Horton painting might be one of his own. When he (painter Frank Brown) was denied access to the painting to check, and when Teri Horton and Paul Biro refused to allow independent examination of the claimed ‘forensic evidence’ used to ‘authenticate’ the painting as a Jackson Pollock, FAR began asking the questions that no one in the media seems to have asked, and we are challenging the evidence presented and the credentials of those making the claims, in the interest of establishing the truth of the situation behind the hype.”
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dphillips[.]fineartregistry.com 
