In the last week
of July 2008, Carol, Steve and I watched My
Kid Could Paint That another great art documentary featured on BBC4. The
documentary tracked the media sensation of Maria Olmstead a four-year-old
‘child-prodigy’ of abstract paintings - whose reputation and that of her
parents - was then undermined by questions about the father’s involvement in
the making of the little girls paintings.
When I was a child my mother did everything in her power to
belittle my artistic ambitions, my drawings and my study – so to see these
parents bill-and-coo over every childish scrawl made by Maria made me pause for
thought.
At first, her father showed her
paintings in a bar. Later in a gallery run by a disgruntled photo-realist
painter - who wanted to get back at an art world that valued his paintings
which he had worked on for months – lower than a canvas by an abstract painter
who had slapped his together over a long night. She became an overnight media
star on American television and started selling her canvases for up to £20,000.
Then a Sixty-Minutes special on her – questioned whether she had painted her
large canvases by herself. The family had agreed to let the producers film her
painting. However the painting she painted on film - lacked the polish, finish
and focused intensity of the canvases she had previously exhibited and sold.
The documentary recorded the sudden
fall from grace of this little girl’s parents and her innocence amidst some
very unsavoury adult characters.
The parents then made their own film of Maria painting – and that canvas too, lacked the power of her exhibited paintings. However, it did look like the last painting she had made on film. I was convinced that her shifty father had been responsible for most of the final work on her paintings. Not that it mattered a dam – her abstract paintings – regardless of who made them – were pointless and crude pastiches of Abstract-Expressionist painters like Pollock, Hoffman, Still and Kline – over sixty years after the fact.
For
a six year old, to paint abstract scrawls on canvases - with paints bought and
put in place by her father – and under his advice was outrageously crass. That
she became so successful only proved again to me how senseless art had become.
She was nothing but a pawn in an adult game of promotion, hype, greed and
deception. You could have taken any half-way talented six year old – supplied
them with large professional canvases and paints and achieved the same results.
Picasso was a real child prodigy – he made things even very talented adults couldn’t
make. ‘Prodigies’ like Maria simply made paintings anyone could make.
The Abstract-Expressionists were not children – they were mature men who
had paid their dues and pursued their vision through many hard times. The
originality, ambition and vision of their art, was based on complex avant-garde
ideas - not traditional hard won techniques. Pollock, Rothko, Kline and de
Kooning spent decades learning their trade, developing their vision and
evolving their signature styles. To parody them was easy. But, to come up with
something as original and groundbreaking was far harder – just ask any young
art student.