Can Fractals Spot a Fake Masterpiece?, Yazzy's at www.walliamverdult.com

 A new study attacks the technique of using fractals, the repeating patterns found in everything from coastlines to fern fronds, to help distinguish authentic Jackson Pollock drip paintings from paint splattered by lesser hands.

In a paper submitted for publication to a major physics journal, researchers report that previously published criteria for identifying genuine Pollocks based on the presence of fractals—patterns that recur in varying sizes like Russian dolls nested inside one another—would wrongly grant Pollock status to a pair of amateur drip paintings.

Some researchers, however, are skeptical that the new method faithfully replicates that of University of Oregon physicist Richard Taylor, who first reported eight years ago that five Pollock paintings contained distinctive splatters within splatters, which he has attributed to the way "Jack the Dripper" swayed over the canvas while dribbling paint from brushes, sticks or straight from the can.

The Pollock–Krasner Foundation, which represents the estates of Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, commissioned Taylor last year to examine six of 32 alleged Pollock drip paintings for fractal clues as to whether the master dripper (dead since 1956) had truly created them; the paintings, discovered in 2003, turned up fractalless.

Upon learning the news, physicists Katherine Jones–Smith and Harsh Mathur of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, published their own Nature paper reporting the discovery of a similar fractal signature in quick sketches of different size stars or circles.

Jones–Smith had drawn the images two years earlier while preparing a presentation on Taylor's work, which she initially believed was correct. Much to her surprise, she discovered that her unsophisticated images contained seemingly identical fractal patterns.