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  A London hedge fund director is suing for his money back on a painting signed "J. Pollock" that came through Glafira Rosales.

The current legal wrangling over the trio of cases involving modern masters sold by the now-defunct Knoedler & Company gallery points to the rising trend of courts deciding the authenticity of artworks.

A judge and jury will conclude whether works supposedly by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko are the real thing or not in three separate cases pending in Manhattan court. Millions of dollars were spent on the artworks from Knoedler. Experts are queued up to defend each side.

Whether the judge rules that the art is authentic or fake weighs little in the art world where saleability is the key issue.

“A decision by a court in the United States that a work is authentic may or may not have any value,” said the lawyer Peter R. Stern in the New York Times. “It’s totally up to the market.”