Fresh evidence could soon resolve a bitter dispute among experts over the authenticity of recently discovered works attributed to Jackson Pollock.

The Straus Center for Art Conservation at Harvard University, which is examining a number of the works, will soon release a scientific analysis of materials used to make them. If proven authentic, the works would be worth millions of dollars.

Ellen Landau, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, believes historical and stylistic evidence shows the works are by Pollock. But experts associated with the influential Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York, named for Pollock and his wife, artist Lee Krasner, disagree.

Landau has no financial stake in the works, which are owned by New York filmmaker Alex Matter.

Matter discovered the works in 2003 in a storage unit on Long Island that had belonged to his father, Herbert Matter, a photographer and graphic designer who had been close friends with Pollock. Herbert Matter died in 1984.

The cache included eight drawings and 24 small paintings, made in Pollock’s characteristic drip-and-splatter style. They were wrapped in brown paper on which Herbert Matter had scribbled a note describing them as Pollock studies made in the late 1940s.

Daron Manoogian, public relations manager for the Harvard University Art Museums, declined to describe the Straus Center study. He indicated the study would be released in a few weeks.

At a conference in Boston in February, a Harvard researcher said publicly that the materials used in the paintings existed during the artist’s lifetime – a key point.

“What we can say is that the materials are consistent with what was available at the time,” Narayan Khandekar, a senior conservation scientist at the Straus Center, told National Public Radio.

If the study bears out Khandekar’s statement, it would help strengthen the case for authenticity, although it would still fall short of definite proof.

Conversely, if the study shows that the materials in the paintings and drawings didn’t exist during Pollock’s lifetime, it would prove he had nothing to do with them.

As Khandekar told NPR in February, “The type of work we do can disprove an attribution but we can never prove an attribution.”

Debate over the works has been acrimonious. Landau co-authored a book to coincide with a traveling show on the contested works. The exhibition and publication of the book were scheduled for August of this year – the 50th anniversary of Pollock’s death.

But officials at Harry N. Abrams Inc., a New York publishing house, said they canceled the book because the Pollock-Krasner Foundation had refused to allow images of known Pollocks to be published in it. Foundation officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Through her publicist in New York, Robin Zucker, Landau declined comment. Plans for the exhibition are still under way, but Zucker said Landau and Matter won’t discuss details until all the venues have been scheduled.

The Harvard study is the latest twist in the academic to-and-fro over the paintings and drawings attributed to Pollock.

Last winter, Richard Taylor, a physics professor at the University of Oregon, published a paper in the British scientific journal Nature saying that computer analysis of the patterns in the paintings owned by Matter were not consistent with known works by Pollock.

That finding appeared to support the contention of Pollock expert Eugene Victor Thaw, who thinks the paintings may have been made by artist Mercedes Matter, the wife of Herbert Matter, or by her students.

But Landau questioned Taylor’s methodology. She pointed out that the Pollock-Krasner Foundation had commissioned Taylor’s research, and that neither Taylor nor the foundation had released the data upon which the findings were based.

The Harvard study was made possible by the loan of works owned by Matter. But Manoogian said the research is independent of either side in the dispute, and that the Straus Center customarily releases all data associated with its findings.