My kid could paint that!

My third and final film of the day yesterday at the Bfi London Film Festival was 'My Kid Could Paint That', a documentary piece on five year old Marla Olmstead and her family.

Many of you will remember claims that there was a 'child prodigy' in America - a 'pint-sized Pollock' whose abstract paintings were flying off the walls of a small gallery in Binghamton, New York and who had taken the art world by storm. Before seeing the film I expected to be furious with the family and to find the paintings contrary to my taste but infact I thought the work was rather good - certainly on a par with other abstract artists work. 'Marla's paintings would sit quite happily alongside a Kandinsky, one of Richter's abstracts or a Basquiat'. Could you tell from her paintings that she was a five year old? Various experts were asked to air their opinions on Marla's paintings and they were convinced that they were the work of an experienced and gifted artist. Perhaps rather unsurprisingly they did not say that the paintings showed any naiivity or lack of drawn or colour composition.

You may even guess Kandinsky was a wee nipper when he did some of his work - Richter was just shplurging paint over the canvas from the age of four or that Basquiat was a slightly disturbed six year old. So if the paintings of a five year old could mix it with these lauded grandees of abstract art (your Rothko's, Newman's, De Kooning's and Twombly's (as displayed in the documentary)) what does that mean for abstract art? While the big names wafted around being frightfully important and giving metaphysical, esoteric explanations for their paintings, were they just having us on?