I’ll admit I felt quite vindicated when I read of a new study this week that found that babies like Van Gogh. It seems he’s as popular with the under-ones as he is with adults, or, more accurately: the adult preference for his work is mirrored in babies, suggesting certain biases in what we choose to look at are already present in infancy and carry over into adulthood. When choosing art for the baby’s room, I looked at work created for that purpose, and almost all of it was saccharine and of poor quality. So I decided on fine art instead. I thought for a long time about which images to choose, wanting something that reflected what I thought he would enjoy, rather than my own specific taste. In the end I opted for The Starry Night, feeling instinctively that he would appreciate its mesmeric swirls as he drifts off to sleep.
The other two I chose were the brightest Jackson Pollock that I could find, and a pleasingly exuberant landscape by David Hockney. (It hardly needs explaining that these are posters that I am talking about. Were they actual originals, I would be writing this from my villa in the Luberon.) Before you pull me up on the lack of representation of female artists, I keep meaning to move the Lee Krasner in the hall in there, and I felt Georgia O’Keeffe was too vaginal, though I suppose babies should sometimes be reminded of where they are from (“She always rejected that interpretation of her work,” I said to my husband, when he remarked upon the print in the bathroom. “Be real,” he said, “It’s a vag”). And so the only female artist represented is my mother, Anna, with her beautiful painting of the bay at Naoussa, Paros. It turns out that this was a good choice, too, as the study found that infants gaze longer at stretches of sky.
