If you’ve ever spent £40 and a whole weekend trying to paint out the scrawling of your young children from your rental walls in the futile hope that this will save your £1,300 deposit, you may greet the following news as I did: with a noise somewhere between a hot-water bottle being emptied and a cry of pain.
A Bavarian toddler, known already within the art world as Laurent Schwarz, has reportedly just landed himself a hefty brand deal with the German paint manufacturer Relius to create a range of colours, and another, separate deal with a wallpaper company – worth, presumably, thousands – all inspired by his own artwork.
Some of Laurent’s acrylic paintings have sold for more than £5,000, with his mother, Lisa, promising that every penny goes into a savings account. Dubbed the “pint-sized Picasso”, Schwarz is said to have a waiting list of hundreds of potential buyers, and has already exhibited his first solo show.
The story, of course, raises those age-old questions about aesthetics: what divides true art from simple decoration? Is there such a thing as talent, or is it all just a matter of interpretation? Who owns a work of art, and who has the agency of its creation? It also forces searing recognition of the sheer state of wealth inequality in modern society. At a time when, according to the German federal statistical office, Statistisches Bundesamt, just over 17.3 million people in Germany – about 20.9% of the population – are living in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion, there is still plenty of money, it seems, among those who have it, to spend on lovely things like paintings and interior decor.
It is all too easy to be snide about the art world; the astronomical sums of money involved, the Hollywood investors, the commodification of creativity and the rumbling feeling of emperor’s new clothes that can hum through the shoes of even the most committed art fan as they stand in a warehouse looking at a pile of apple cores, fibreglass offcuts and a dirty teaspoon labelled in the installation copy as The Crushing Sense of the End of the World, and retailing at £75,000.
But sniggering at art is neither new nor particularly interesting. What is compelling, in my experience, is to witness the innate desire for mark-making, for building shrines and sculptures, the appetite for colour and texture that seems to exist in all small children. I cannot call it universal, of course, just as I can’t claim that a hunger for milk or desire for human touch is universal, but our intense pleasure in art does seem common and even central to a collective human experience.
One grey and windswept day in yet another inner-city playground that felt like a filming location for a Soviet-era disaster film, I sat in a fox-smelling sand pit and watched my 14-month-old son spend at least 40 minutes slowly and methodically arranging a pile of leaves into a fan shape around a central mound. Another happy Tuesday, I spent about an hour wishing I was in bed, while he very deliberately placed empty snail shells, stones and pieces of twig on the stumps of a coppiced tree. Even at the time, through the haze of sleep deprivation and swollen breasts, I remember thinking about the inlays and mantels in Skara Brae; about the bone carvings and amulets found in peat bogs; about the altars in ancient Egypt and how, even 5,000 years ago, when most people were living on the hardest edge of basic subsistence, we still had the urge to create art, to display our mark-making and revere certain objects above others.
I am not, personally, a fan of creating “brands” around children. I chose long ago to keep images of my son off social media as much as possible and to keep any mention of him in my writing fairly vague and anonymous. The idea of promoting his paintings on a devoted Instagram page and touting his name for brand deals before he turned three did not appeal. I felt guilty enough just writing a memoir. But I do recognise and appreciate that the urge to create things – sometimes genuinely beautiful things – can be as strong in children as among any group of art school graduates. It would just be lovely to have a culture and politics that recognised the innate value of that, of making and expression for its own sake, rather than simply as a way to add to the economy. As a contributor to the “market”. Or as part of a “deal”.
Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
