🇺🇸Marla
Olmstead

Her father was painting in the kitchen of their Binghamton home, and she wanted to join. She was not yet two years old. Mark Olmstead handed his daughter a small brush, set out some paint, and expected what parents generally expect when they hand a toddler art supplies: a cheerful mess, a few scrawled lines, something to photograph and send to the grandparents. What Marla Olmstead produced instead was something that required, eventually, a documentary film to begin to understand.

By early 2002, when she was barely past her first birthday, Marla had established a routine: paint every day, work in silence, cover the canvas with interlocking gestures of pure color that her father began to regard with a kind of stunned uncertainty. He was himself an amateur painter with no professional standing. He knew what he was looking at on his daughter's small canvases was not what a normal toddler produced. He did not know what to do with that knowledge. He began photographing her work. He began keeping the canvases instead of letting her use them as drop cloths. He showed them to friends, who showed them to friends, until eventually they reached Anthony Brunelli, a Binghamton gallery owner, who looked at them carefully and said he would like to sell them.

In 2004, when Marla was four, Brunelli Fine Arts mounted a show. The paintings sold. All of them. Buyers paid $250 for smaller pieces, $1,500 for larger ones, and the gallery was congratulating itself on a modest if unusual success when media attention arrived and transformed everything. A profile in the local newspaper moved to the Associated Press wire. National media followed. By the end of 2004, Marla Olmstead's paintings were selling for $25,000. Her parents had received orders totaling $300,000. The gallery had a waiting list. Art critics who had spent careers explaining why certain kinds of abstract expressionism worked found themselves looking at canvases made by a four-year-old and admitting they could not explain why these worked — only that they did.

The paintings were large — some five feet square — and worked in thickly applied acrylics with the unselfconscious physicality that critics had always associated with the action painters of the 1950s: Pollock, de Kooning, Kline. They had a quality that professional abstract painters spent years trying to achieve and rarely did — the quality of looking finished without looking labored, of possessing compositional logic without having been composed. Whether that quality arose from Marla's hand alone was a question the documentary film directed by Amir Bar-Lev would spend ninety minutes attempting to answer.

In February 2005, CBS News' 60 Minutes II broadcast an investigation suggesting that Mark Olmstead may have been coaching or completing Marla's paintings — that what was being sold as the unassisted work of a four-year-old might be, at least in part, the work of an adult. A child psychologist, reviewing footage of Marla painting at home, said she saw no evidence of prodigious ability, only a normal child. The Olmstead family maintained that Marla worked alone. The footage that 60 Minutes used had, the family said, been filmed under conditions that prevented Marla from working normally — in a room full of cameras and strangers, she had painted badly, which was not evidence that she had always painted badly.

Bar-Lev's film, released in 2007, did not resolve the question — and this was, critics recognized, its great achievement. Instead of debunking or celebrating, it asked what we need art to be, and why we need it to come from the right source. The film examined the Olmstead family with sympathy and complexity, and it asked an uncomfortable question of the art world: if you cannot tell the difference between a four-year-old's painting and an adult's, what exactly are you responding to when you respond to abstract art? The documentary received a 7.1 on IMDb and was shortlisted for Academy Award consideration. It remains one of the most thoughtful films ever made about authenticity, childhood, and the market for contemporary art.

Marla Olmstead, who had no say in any of this, grew up in Binghamton. She continued to paint through her teens. Whether or not the controversy around her childhood work was ever fully resolved, the work itself — those early canvases of vivid color and surprising compositional authority — continued to sell and continued to be collected. She did not disappear. She grew into an adult with a story she had not chosen, and an aesthetic legacy more complicated and more interesting than most artists twice her age achieve.