This thread reminds me, I had meant to post this piece from last week's Guardian somewhere. In the absence of an MN Pseud's Corner, I reckon this thread is the perfect spot.
Jonathan Jones on art
'I let her touch the sculptures. What harm can baby hands do?'
The other day, my four-year-old daughter told me with a grin: "I'm chopping the fish." She had a toy knife and a plastic bowl. Inside the bowl was a jigsaw piece with the word "fish" on it. Kids, eh ? teach them to read and they think they're René Magritte.
Primavera's love of clowning is certainly fed by a precocious knowledge of art. On her first day at nursery last year, she was shown a painting of flowers. Asked what it was, she replied: "Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh." She was right ? it was, but I think she was just meant to say "flowers".
In Jean-Luc Godard's film Bande à Part, there is a scene where the heroes run through the Louvre, past the history paintings of David and Géricault. I've got used to running through museums in the same way. The Elgin Marbles gallery in the British Museum is my daughter's personal racetrack (we live nearby) and one day I hope to be able to stop and look at the frieze. But she learns on the hoof. Ask her what those half-horse monsters carved into the marble are and she'll tell you they are centaurs.
I love two things in this world, art and my family, so of course the two come together in all sorts of ways. We visit galleries a lot, and Primavera knows ? increasingly ? that I write about art and that it may therefore be a way of getting my attention. This summer, she strode around the Uffizi gallery in Florence announcing herself as Primavera, the most important modern artist in the world.
But I definitely don't have aspirations to turn her into an art critic or an artist. The wonderful thing about being four is that all the world, all possibilities, are waiting. Who knows where this will lead? What I do believe in is education, and that museums are great places to nurture minds of all ages. This discovery is scarcely unique to me; Britain's museums are full of families. But I have learned a couple of things that might help.
One is that adults who are bored by museums will communicate that boredom. Her parents both love museums, so the enthusiasm is infectious; she knows we are at our best there. Another thing is to break the rules, or at least bend them. When she was a baby I let her touch the sculptures, surreptitiously. What harm can baby hands do? Now we play and yell in galleries, occasionally reprimanded by a humourless guard. Would they rather I sat her at home in front of CBeebies?
Our favourite museum is the one with the dinosaurs, of course, and the richness of the Natural History museum is magical. But art creeps in even there. Once we were playing in its Investigate room and Primavera organised some butterflies into a Hirst-like installation. "It's modern art!" commented a supervisor. Well, she says she's the most important modern artist in the world: what did they expect?