Decrepit Old Fool

Last night I went to the Historic Normal Theater to see My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about Marla Omstead, a child art prodigy.  At age four she became an international sensation by creating a number of abstract paintings that took the art world by storm.

I remembered blogging about Marla a couple years ago, but could not recall what I had said about her.  Fine, I thought, I’ll go see the movie and then look up my old post.

The documentary walks a fine line of agnosticism and is beautifully done.  My sympathies were mostly with photorealist painter Anthony Brunelli, who lamented that he spends a year on a painting and has never sold one for more than a hundred thou, only to see two splotches of paint on a canvas go for ten times that much.  He says; “Hey, screw you, abstract art world; I’ve got paintings by a four-year-old that you can’t tell from Kandinsky.  What do you think of that?!”

But despite the SF Chronicle’s attempts to posit Brunelli as the villain, I saw him as one of the most sane people in the documentary.  Of course if you have been reading this blog for very long you know that I just don’t ‘get’ abstract art.  My feelings are best described by this unfortunately erroneous prediction set in the futuristic year 2000:

7. “The cult of the phony in art will disappear.  So-called “modern art” will only be discussed by psychiatrists.”
- Robert Heinlein, 1950

The fascinating aspect of the documentary was how badly people wanted  to believe that this sweet little 4-year-old possessed a visual and conceptual sophistication of someone much older.  You could see it in interviews with people who had been taken in collectors who had purchased her works; they could expound at length on the symbolism and imagery.  “See, up in this little corner of the painting, this is a doorway, and another person’s face is looking back through the doorway, and in the distance, you can see an infant’s face, like a sonogram…” 

Yeah, OK.  And if you were deeply religious, you’d be seeing the face of Mary in a cheese sandwich.

At one point, 60 Minutes did a very negative piece about Marla, which left the impression she couldn’t possibly have done her own paintings.  The family fought back, and eventually made DVD showing her painting one of her works from start to finish.  Her reputation, which briefly bottomed out after the TV broadcast, recovered and today her paintings are selling again, if more slowly. 

I liked the small-newspaper arts reporter who broke the story of Marla – she had a sense of perspective on what fame could do to a little child and reached a point after the 60 Minutes broadcast where she wouldn’t report on it anymore.  She really cared about the little girl, and it’s difficult to find anyone in the story who didn’t – except that they were all caught up in the hype.

For what it’s worth, I think young Marla Olmstead, now 6 and now certainly doing her own paintings, probably did have some help from her dad on the early ones.  But to admit as much would open her parents to some rather giant lawsuits from collectors who paid big bucks for paint splotches putatively done by a 4-year-old. I just hope she manages to grow up without severe psychological damage from it all.

What’s going to happen to Marla?  And how do you feel abut abstract art?

End Notes:

• Turns out, I hadn’t exactly been taken in by little girl’s story, as my previous post was titled; “With the right marketing…

• Illustration above stolen from BBC which I photoshopped to make Marla black & white, pumped up the saturation of the painting and left background as it is.  When I think about the technological infrastructure needed for me to casually Photoshop a picture, and how much of that infrastructure was around when i was four, well… electricity had been commercialized and there were mainframe computers flipping punch cards around.
• Other posts I’ve written about art – it seems likely that nobody will be offering me a position as the curator of a modern art museum.