Toddler painting is painting such that a normal person would suppose that a pre-school toddler had done the work. In some toddler painting there will be simple representations of faces, bodies, houses, or any of the objects that fill a toddlers world, in which the paint appears to have been roughly laid on, with little care or control. Forms are crude, and follow the typically childish formulae. They will often display bright colors, which are smudged or blotted around in authentic toddler fashion. Another toddler style consists of what seem to be aimless scribbles distributed across a canvas or board in much the way a three or four-year-old might handle a pencil. De Kooning is a nice example of a toddler painter. He is more usually referred to as an abstract expressionist, and not all his paintings were really perfect toddler paintings. He is still alive (in 1999), an unfortunate victim of Alzheimer's disease, and there is some dispute as to the value of his later work. Nevertheless, like the one shown here, left, Marilyn Monroe, some of his purest toddler works are quite appealing. Sometimes a toddler painting can include manifestly non-toddler effects, like some simple mathematically annotated geometric figures, as seen in some of Twombley's work (e.g. Bolsena, bottom). In this case the effect is of a toddler using some paper he has been given by his mother or father which has an older child's rough homework on it already. The toddler effect usually is still strong, though. In Twombley's picture shown below right (Italians) a few slicker pencil lines spoil the toddler effect, but it is still a rather compelling example. Twombley is often compared to the abstract expressionists, although he is not usually claimed as one.

Toddler painting probably evokes more outraged comment from normal people than any other art style, and is very inaccessible to people outside the world of art-politics. De Kooning was an embarrassing case, because as his mind degenerated with the ravages of Alzheimer's' his paintings didn't deteriorate in any obvious way from those of his earlier epoch. There were quite a lot of meetings of erudite figures from the art world to establish that from 1988 onwards his paintings were to be officially regarded as garbage. Closer and more critical examination of some toddler paintings soon reveals that toddlers could not have done them. Elements such as the silhouette of Marilyn Monroe's head merging with the face on view don't usually occur in the real works of toddlers, and the colors are often more conventionally harmonious than we find in the work of real toddlers.

More de Kooning| Art Styles

Twombley is a toddler painter par excellence. The confident scribbles with which he covers his canvases are executed with an uncannily toddler-like touch, and in the case of some paintings it is hard to believe a grown man did them. Even so, one can eventually spot age-anachronisms, so even Twombley can't be seen as a perfect toddler painter. His paintings don't seem to grow on one in the way that de Kooning's do though. It's hard to say whether its just because de Kooning uses color so nicely, or whether it's because one is constantly brought back to the scribbling toddler in Twombley's works.

The detail from Twombley's Bolsena (left) shows how the presence of geometric drawings labeled with numbers destroys the illusion that the whole work was done by a toddler. Yet it does not change the perception that a work deliberately created by a toddler has been executed on a piece of paper previously used for some simple mathematical doodling by another hand.

In all this discussion it should be borne in mind that seeing the actual painting at its true size is really the only way to judge the merit of the work - even on the most superficial level.

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