Did he, or didn't he?

CHESTNUT HILL -- The tiny McMullen Museum of Art, tucked across from the admissions office in Boston College's Devlin Hall, is free to visitors and closes between shows. The nearest it has come to courting controversy in its 14-year history was a 1999 Irish art exhibition that featured a photographic portrait of an artist wearing nothing but a condom.

But this September, due to an unlikely series of events, the McMullen will be the first museum in the country to display a hotly disputed collection of works that may or may not have been painted by abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Museum officials won't say how many people they expect to draw to the campus, or whether they think "Pollock Matters" will break an attendance record set in 1999 for an exhibition featuring a rarely seen Caravaggio painting. Still, months before opening, word of the show is spreading among art historians, who say they're pleased a museum with the McMullen's reputation will display the controversial works.

Mark Bessire, director of the Bates College Museum of Art, said he was surprised the McMullen, known for scholarly exhibitions on the painter Edvard Munch and surrealist Roberto Matta, would host the show.

"It's definitely taking a risk, and exciting for them to be taking that risk," he said. "And because they have such integrity, I think it's great for them." The risk comes with entering what one Pollock historian describes as a "swamp" -- the debate over the paintings New York filmmaker Alex Matter found five years ago in a locker rented by his late father, Herbert, labeled as works by Pollock.

"This whole question of Pollock attributions, and the different reasons for believing or not believing, is so complicated," says Pepe Karmel, a New York University professor who co-curated a Pollock show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998. "It is so highly subjective, and personal investments are so high on both sides of the issue that it's hard to have a rational discussion on this subject."

Two key Pollock scholars who publicly questioned the Matter pictures, Francis O'Connor and Eugene Thaw, no longer do interviews. Ellen Landau, a Pollock historian who believes they are authentic, now refers questions to her publicist.

Meanwhile, McMullen director Nancy Netzer is learning how difficult it will be to pull the show together. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which owns the copyrights on reproductions of the artist's works, informed her this month that it will not allow the McMullen to use photographs of Pollock's work in the exhibition's catalog or in galleries.

Netzer says she's not taking sides. She just wants the controversial paintings to be seen.

"We're not in this for any other reason except that we believe that this is an important, scholarly research project," Netzer said from her office recently. "We'd be happy to put this on if there wasn't this firestorm. We're not looking for publicity."

After all, the show has already been scheduled, and cancel ed, at two other museums.

An earlier version was slated to open last year at Guild Hall, a cultural center in East Hampton, N.Y. That would have focused almost entirely on many of the 32 works placed in a storage locker in 1980 by Herbert Matter, a close friend of Pollock's. Matter died in 1984 and his son found the paintings 18 years later.

Some art scholars have come out to proclaim them genuine Pollocks. Others, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, have questioned their authenticity. For Pollock scholars, the works, if genuine, offer a new body of work to study. For Matter, the paintings could be worth millions.

The Guild Hall show collapsed when New York art dealer Mark Borghi, who is representing Alex Matter, insisted the paintings be labeled Pollocks, according to Ruth Appelhof, Guild Hall's executive director.

"Pollock Matters" then found a home at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y., and at the McMullen. Both museums agreed to pay $45,000 to stage the traveling exhibition. It would open at the Everson in June, and continue to Boston College.

All of that changed because of a Harvard University Art Museums study of three of Matter's paintings. The results, which stated that some paints and materials used in the works couldn't have been around in Pollock's lifetime, came out in January. But Borghi and Matter, who requested the study, heard rumblings of the likely conclusions back in 2006.

On Jan. 18, Borghi came to Boston College to cancel the original show. He told Netzer it couldn't take place in light of the findings at Harvard. (The university's researchers had been letting him know of their progress, Netzer says.) He also told Netzer that the Everson show had been canceled.

Netzer agreed, but then began to talk about the McMullen organizing a reconstituted "Pollock Matters" exhibition. (As of this week, no formal contract has been signed, though Netzer says Borghi has agreed to loan the works.)

Around lunch time on Jan. 29, about four hours before Harvard's study was released, Netzer announced the new plans for the Matter pictures. In Syracuse, Sandra Trop, the Everson's director, said she hadn't heard a word. "I don't know whether she's delusional or not," Trop said of Netzer.

Netzer said her motivation for organizing the new incarnation of the show is not financial. The exhibition, which the Everson last week announced would come to Syracuse after Boston, will cost considerably more than before. She won't say exactly how much, but the catalog alone should be at least twice the $45,000 rental fee for the now-canceled traveling show. And the Matter pictures are going to be placed in a separate room at the McMullen, labeled "problems for study."

"What it does is it shows that they're a scholarly institution looking to find out what the truth is," says Patricia Hills, an art history professor at Boston University.

Seven months before the show opens, the McMullen is scrambling for paintings to borrow. (The MFA, which is studying four of the disputed paintings, hasn't let her know whether it will loan "Number 10," one of two Pollock paintings in its collection.)

Netzer says the revamped "Pollock Matters" exhibition will, like the earlier show, be curated by Landau. But the exhibition is different. Instead of centering on the 25 Matter paintings, the show will feature 100 in total. Many won't be Pollocks, and that's the point. The new exhibition is meant to explore the relationship of Pollock, his wife, Lee Krasner, and the Matters. Herbert Matter's photography will be featured, as will the paintings of his wife, Mercedes. So will Krasner's paintings. Netzer is particularly pleased that putting on the exhibition means saving the work of Boston College art history professor Claude Cernuschi and physics professor Andrzej Herczynski. The pair were slated to publish a pair of essays in the original exhibition catalog .

On a recent afternoon, the three sat in Netzer's cramped office discussing the show. The professors said that they hoped the questions swirling around Matter's paintings did not overshadow their work on Pollock.

Their study deals with the range of sizes in Pollock's catalogue raisonne, considered the official source listing authentic works. Pollock was known for the way he would splatter and drip paint onto a canvas, and the scholars have studied how the laws of physics played into his work.

"This is extremely important because Pollock's work is distinguished from paintings of, say, the Old Masters because it has no center of attention," says Cernuschi. "And many people have assumed that as a result, the size doesn't matter. They've been compared, in a pejorative way, to wallpaper. The contribution of our essay is to say, no, there are reasons why the paintings are done. There are limits of the technique."

"We made an argument that to maintain a Pollockian way of painting, you've got to have at least a minimum of size," adds Herczynski. The Matter paintings, they say, test that standard. In fact, there is only one known Pollock that is smaller, says Cernuschi. Which is not to say he's taking a side. The pair says that the question is complicated. Pollock was known for being experimental. Yet there is also a strong, historical link between Herbert Matter and Pollock. Harvard's study doesn't settle the issue for Herczynski. While Harvard stated that certain pigment and materials dated to after Pollock's death, most of the paint is from the artist's era.

"I think Harvard did a beautiful job on the report," says Herczynski. "But do you see that it is very hard to conceive of a scenario whereby 24 paintings or 32 are faked on the proper board with some paints that are OK but others that are not and somebody said, 'All right, I'm going to take the world for a spin but I'm not going to do one, I'm going to do 32?' And not only this, suddenly these things appear in the storage in a wrapper signed by a friend. I don't understand what this is."

Although Netzer handled the latest round of negotiations, Cernuschi created the original connection between the McMullen and the Matter camp. He had read about the Matter pictures in the New York Times two years ago, and got in touch with Landau, the Case Western professor who would create a rift in the Pollock community by declaring the works authentic.

Though Landau is curating the McMullen exhibit, Netzer said the museum does not endorse her view. She said that Borghi and Matter won't have any influence on the exhibit.

"The show's going to open with us saying, ' We don't know the answer,' " says Netzer. "But we're going to do our darndest to lay out all the evidence so that everybody can see these pictures."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. For more on the arts go to boston.com/ae/exhibitionist.