Self-storage auction buyers Tarina Keenan and Roger Overstreet were surprised last month when they discovered that 26 paintings inside a unit they paid $45 for were signed by well-known 20th-century artists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The couple acquired the contents during a lien sale at Winter’s Mini Storage in Vinton, Va., but any thoughts of fortune have been tempered by the artworks’ connection to the “J. Brennerman Collection,” a controversial assortment whose pieces are believed to be fakes by art experts, according to the source.

The unit came up for auction after an unidentified tenant died, according to Trevor Winter-Pierce, operations manager at Winter’s Mini, who declined to reveal the customer’s name. All the paintings contain handwritten inventory numbers and identification tying them to the Brennerman collection. Twenty-five of them have a Pollack signature, with at least one indicating it’s worth $300 million.

Keenan and Overstreet began to doubt the legitimacy of their find after searching online for more information. In 2017, the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a New York-based nonprofit created in the 1960s by art scholars in part to keep forgeries out of public circulation, published an article in which it referred to the Brennerman collection an “apparent and audacious scam” involving “bogus Pollocks,” the source reported. IFAR examined four paintings from three separate owners. Forensic tests determined the works were created with a kind of acrylic paint not available until the 1980s. Pollock was known not to use acrylics and died in 1956.

IFAR has also questioned the authenticity of supporting documentation about the artwork and whether James Brennerman, the man credited with amassing the collection, ever existed. The story behind the collection suggests Brennerman emigrated to the United States from Germany to Chicago in the 1930s and eventually left the collection to the family of his servants. IFAR researchers wrote that Brennerman’s name doesn’t appear in any government immigration or Social Security records.

All four paintings examined by IFAR were sold by the owner of a Roanoke, Va., strip club, who wasn’t named in the organization’s article. Billy Harbour, a former strip-club owner who believes he’s the seller referred to in the article, owns hundreds of paintings from the Brennerman collection, including other Pollacks and works attributed to Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. Harbour amassed his assortment over 25 years, though the bulk of it came from a Roanoke antique dealer who died in 2000, he told the source.

Harbour believes Brennerman existed and that at least some of the paintings are authentic. Even those that are forgeries may have value. “Sometimes forgeries of the era are more valuable, if you can figure out who the forger was,” he told the source, noting that he found it puzzling why someone would abandon potentially valuable artwork in a self-storage unit.

Keenan and Overstreet, who plan to open a thrift store in October, also question why someone would leave the paintings in the unit if they were valuable. “If it was worth more it would never be in that storage unit,” Keenan told the source. “I don’t want to sell them as real, if they’re not real.”

Source:
The Roanoke Times, Art Found in Vinton Storage Unit Linked to Controversial Collection