From the
brushes of babes

>> Amir Bar-Lev on his new documentary
My Kid Could Paint That, which tackles
the case of a mysterious child prodigy

by MARK SLUTSKY

Amir Bar-Lev was in the right place at the right time. When he began filming the documentary that would become My Kid Could Paint That, Marla Olmstead was a four-year-old painter who her parents and dealer claimed was a child prodigy of abstract expressionism. Almost overnight, she became a media sensation, with her paintings selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and just as quickly, after a sceptical piece on her was aired on 60 Minutes II, she became the centre of a controversy surrounding the authenticity of her paintings.

YOU BE THE JUDGE: An Olmstead painting

Throughout it all, Bar-Lev was there with his camera, resulting in a candid documentary that asks many questions, but leaves it to the viewer to answer them. As he puts it, when he started, he wasn’t expecting to make the movie he did. “I had no idea that there would be a potential hoax surrounding these paintings,” he says. “I was really interested in the issues that are brought up when a four-year-old is said to be a prodigy in abstract expressionism. It’s rich stuff. You have the way media turns people into celebrities; we’re used to that now, but when you see that happen to a four-year-old, it really is striking. It fascinated me also on the question of how one values art. Because it’s easy to ascertain when a four-year-old is a prodigy in chess, because there’s objective rules to chess, and you can clearly see that the kid is playing chess like an adult. But when you have a four-year-old who’s said to be doing abstract expression in a prodigious fashion, it makes you start to ask, ‘Well what makes art good? How does one judge?’ and those are the things that I thought I was getting into, and that still interest me about the film.”

As events unfold around her and emotions rage, the young painter seems almost blissfully unperturbed, even unaware, of what’s going on. “Somebody said—it’s not my line—that in retrospect, her policy of non-engagement with the press seems wise beyond her years,” Bar-Lev says, laughing. “I think that the film is really not about her. And in a way, I’m glad that she wanted to be treated like a kid, didn’t want to be interviewed, and I’m kind of glad she didn’t say too much. Because ultimately I may have gone into it interested in Marla Olmstead’s mind, but I came to see that that maybe isn’t the most healthy thing for a kid, to be put in a petri dish like that. So in the editing room, we put in just enough Marla Olmstead so that you understood how absurd it was to turn her into a documentary subject.”

STANDING BEHIND HIS VISION OF EVENTS: Bar-Lev

One of the key elements of the 60 Minutes piece was a sequence in which Marla was filmed painting with no adult assistance. Whether the pieces she produced “alone” are markedly different from her other works may be debatable, but they certainly seem less refined than her show paintings. But the question is still open. “It’s very complicated, and in a way it’s kind of a perfect mystery,” says Bar-Lev. “Because one could conclude that the camera affected her paintings. One could conclude that she had some bad days as an artist. And one could conclude that somebody else helped her with some of the paintings when the camera wasn’t around. And that’s what you have to decide as a viewer.”

The Olmstead family let Bar-Lev into their lives, and you have to wonder how they feel about the finished My Kid Could Paint That, which doesn’t exactly take their point of view. “They are unhappy with the film,” Bar-Lev says. “I don’t want to put words in their mouth so much, but what I want to say is that I would guess that they feel that the film could have done worse by them, and I would guess that they probably feel that it could have done better by them too. But I made the film as truthful as I could and I also tried to draw attention to the fact that it’s simply my perspective, and that it’s a representation of this family, and not the family itself. I think that ultimately it’s not about striving for objectivity, but about striving to make a statement that you can live with and that you can stand behind. And I firmly stand behind my version of events.”

My Kid Could Paint That opens this Friday, Jan. 11

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