Genius or Hoax?

I just watched a documentary called "My Kid Could Paint That" which some of you might know is about Marla Olmstead, the "child prodigy artist" from upstate New York whose paintings each sell well into the five figures. There has been much controversy in the last five years regarding Marla and her art. She has a dad who is an aspiring artist, but who works the nightshift at a (I think, though I'm not sure I'm remembering this correctly) Frito Lay or Oscar Mayer plant and has never gone anywhere with his own paintings. One day when he was painting, Marla asked for her own canvas and paint and the rest, as they say, is history. When, at the age of four, her work began selling for substantial prices, 60 Minutes did a story on her and based on the footage they got of her working, came to the conclusion that she didn't actually paint the pieces herself, or at the very least not without help, thus angering her parents who in turn released a documentary DVD showing Marla completing a piece from start to finish.

The documentary filmmaker who made this particular film really and truly wanted to prove that Marla does in fact paint her own works from beginning to end without any help from adults, that she really is a child genius whose work deserves to sell for the figures it sells for, but he came away from this shoot thinking what most other people have felt: that Marla's work is not her own.

The trouble, it seems, is that when anyone other than her parents point a camera at her while she works, her paintings just don't look even remotely like those seen in the gallery she is represented by. The subtle nuances aren't there, the delicate lines, the obvious dexterity, the polished and finished look of the works available for purchase. Her works that have been caught on film in progress and in fact are never seen completed, while they contain many of the same images as the finished pieces, really look like nothing more than a child's drawings of suns and flowers and scribbles. Sometimes the paint is blobbed onto the canvas and swirled into a giant mess of hideous color and nothing more. And while she's being filmed painting she also repeatedly demands that her dad help her out, that he choose the paint for her or even paint something himself on her canvas. He laughs too hard and tells her she knows that isn't possible. When questioned by filmmakers why she is doing this, the dad without fail protests too much. Way, way too much.

Having watched this film and then taken a look at the works for sale on her website, I too have come to the conclusion that if someone else isn't painting these works in their entirety, then she surely is having them seriously tweaked by someone older, more mature and with a certain sense of balance a work requires, even abstract modern art that on the surface appears to be just willy nilly daubs of paint. I began watching this film thinking how amazing it was for a very small child to possess such talent but ended it thinking what everyone else who has watched her "work" has come to think: someone, somewhere is lying. They have to be. While a great many people have stood in front of a Jackson Pollock and with scorn in their voices said, "This is garbage. My five year old could do that!" the fact is that there are few, if any, adults who could do what Pollock did, let alone a five year old. Yet Marla has a few paintings that are very similar to those of Jackson Pollock's splatter paintings. And Klee's work. And Kandinsky. Coincidence? Not likely. And while her works all have a similar thread that runs through them that enables the viewer to readily identify them as having been painted by the same hand, there is also enough similarity to many well-known works that it quickly becomes obvious that a child that young couldn't possibly be adept at so many varied techniques and styles.

So one is forced to return over and over again to the one question that has plagued so many who have not only merely watched documentary footage of Marla, but have personally spent time with the Olmstead family: if Marla paints these works herself from start to finish without aid of any kind, why is she consistently unable to do this (even on hidden camera) when being filmed? Why is the only "evidence" of her abilities as an artist filmed by her mother? These are some lovely paintings, and Marla who is now eight, is a lovely child, but an artist worthy of making hundreds of thousands of dollars for her work? Sadly, I think not.