My Art Belongs To Daddy

Halfway through the docu-mentary My Kid Could Paint That, we see proud parents Mark and Laura Olmstead curled up on their couch to watch 60 Minutes. It’s the night that a segment is airing about their daughter Marla, who, despite being only four years old, is one of the art world’s great rising stars, with collectors paying four- and five-figure sums for her cheerful, colourful abstract canvases. She’s a pee-wee Pollock, a pre-kindergarten Kandinsky, a De Kooning in diapers, a rugrat Rauschenberg, a toddler Twombly—okay, okay, I’ll stop—and even TV shows with zero interest in modern art have been eating her story up.

At first, the 60 Minutes piece follows the Marla Olmstead boilerplate, with Mark, an amateur painter himself, describing how he first put a paintbrush in Marla’s hand, and Anthony Brunelli, the local gallery owner who “discovered” Marla and her eagerest promoter, describing her as a prodigy on par with Mozart.

But then the report takes an unexpected turn, as a child psychologist examines the footage the 60 Minutes crew has shot of Marla painting. Her mood darkens. Marla isn’t behaving the way a true child prodigy would, she says, and her painting technique seems markedly different from that of the paintings being exhibited under her name. Hidden-camera footage of Marla at work seems to suggest that her father Mark is coaching her from the sidelines. The psychologist doesn’t come right out and say it, but the segment basically implies that Mark is either embellishing Marla’s paintings after the fact or is creating them himself. Either way, the Olmsteads appear to be perpetrating a massive fraud.

In some ways, My Kid Could Paint That is more interesting before the question of the authorship of Marla’s paintings arises. I love stories about the nature of art, and the Marla Olmstead case raises exactly the kinds of questions that, as someone who evaluates art for a living, I find most provocative. Is it possible for a four-year-old with no aesthetic consciousness to make art? What’s the difference between Marla and one of those elephants at the zoo that “paints” canvases when you stick a brush in its trunk? Should the story behind the creation of a work of art, or the artist’s biography, have any bearing on art’s artistic merit? How much influence can her father have over the painting before it becomes too “tainted” to be worth anything? I’m reminded of that great moment from John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation where an art collector walks into a kindergarten classroom and marvels at the drawings thumbtacked to the walls. “Your students are all Chagalls and Cézannes!” he tells the teacher. “How do you do it?” To which she replies, “I know when to take the painting away from them.”

But these themes pretty much fall by the wayside as the film becomes more about director Amir Bar-Lev’s quest to get Marla to paint a canvas on camera. The 60 Minutes crew couldn’t do it, and he can’t either—and as all the uneventful footage of Marla in her workroom piles up, Mark’s insistence that cameras make Marla too self-conscious to paint the way she does in private start to ring increasingly false. Bar-Lev becomes more and more of a presence in his own film as he wrestles with his doubts about the true extent of Marla’s talents and his guilt over potentially betraying the trust that the Olmsteads placed in him by allowing his crew into their home.

These issues are probably of more interest to other documentary filmmakers than documentary audiences—I personally was much more fascinated by Brunelli, the gallery owner, who embraces Marla as a genius or rejects her as his little prank on the blockheaded New York art scene, whichever is most convenient at the time.

But My Kid Could Paint That is one of those stories that contains so many issues, everyone will find something different in it to be fascinated by. Near the end of the film, Laura Olmstead begins crying in the middle of an interview, much to her own embarrassment. “Documentary gold,” she mutters sarcastically as she walks away from the camera.

Indeed.