Meet the moppet Miró, the kinder Kandinski.
You will — one of the more engaging documentaries at the 2007 Sundance Festival is MY KID COULD PAINT THAT, director Amir Bar-Lev‘s look at the controversy over child artist Marla Olmstead, whom some gallery owners called a prodigy, and whose abstract work some critics compared to Paul Klee and Juan Miró.
Sony Pictures Classics announced this week that it had acquired the rigths to the film for $2 million, and festival reviews – including this one from the Hollywood Reporter – are enthusiastic.
Remarkably, the director asked the Olmsteads to participate in the film, and they agreed — even after the authenticity of their daughter’s work had been challenged in a Feb. 2005 installment of 60 Minutes. Over the course of filming, writes the New York Times, “”Mr. Bar-Lev begins to have misgivings and finds his role as family familiar and advocate morphing into something darker. The movie is a transparent rendering of the journalistic process, and the picture is none too pretty.”
When Bar-Lev started work, the young artist was already a sensation — she’d had her first solo show, sold several paintings, and a Birmingham, NY area reporter had broken the story.
By October, 2004, Gaby Wood of The Observer (UK) became one of the first international print journalists to visit Marla Olmstead en-suite — at the studio of gallery owner Anthony Brunelli.

That summer after young Marla’s first show, Wood reported, the artist’s canvases were fetching $1,500 each. .”Three weeks ago they had gone up to $6,000, and on my arrival at the gallery the one piece remaining had been priced at $15,000. What they’ll be worth by the time you read this is anyone’s guess.”
Gaby Wood continues:

“I am greeted at Anthony Brunelli’s loft – two floors above his gallery – by Marla’s extended entourage: her mother, her brother, her grandmother, her aunt, and her gallerist’s wife. (Brunelli and Marla’s father are downstairs, bringing her latest work in from the car.) They are sitting around a huge open-plan space with exposed brick walls and all the mod cons a small star could hope for – plasma TV, vintage arcade game, supersized jars of sweets on the kitchen counter. Marla, a lovely-looking slip of a girl wearing a blue tar tan miniskirt, is tucking into a bowl of jelly beans. Her two-year-old brother, Zane, has nearly finished his, and zips around, talks over her, grins at the slightest opportunity. Marla, by way of greeting, offers a wide-eyed stare.
I tell her I like her paintings.
‘What do you say when someone compliments you, Marla?’ her mother calls from the other end of the room.
‘Thank you,’ she says obediently, and looks down at her jelly beans.
‘What’s your favourite colour?’ I ask, bending down to look at them with her. Rarely has that seemed a more loaded question.
‘Pink,’ she says, automatically. There isn’t a pink jelly bean, nor is there really any pink in her paintings. Her answer is the same as any four-year-old girl’s. Of course. What did I expect her to say – international Yves Klein blue?

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Again, the link to Gaby Wood’s “http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1334512,00.htmlWhat I Did Today” in the Observer.
And again, a photograph of the artist, then four years old, from the Sundance press site. Her parents must be extremely proud of her.

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