As she was a museum curator her entire professional life, she likes to introduce kids to the world of Old Master paintings. She has a logical place to start in a book by Maria-Christina Sayn-Wittgenstein Nottenbohm called “Old Masters Rock” ...
She asks the kids to pick a picture from the book to discuss and practice their reading skills on the serious but accessible text.
I remember the days when I was taken (dragged) from one museum to another because my parents enjoyed museums. As an art dealer, it was my father’s business as well. I do remember some highlights, like being told I was going to see the Mona Lisa at the age of 6 and my disappointment when my father pointed out this small dark picture in an underlit corridor at the Louvre, where it was hung at the time. This was circa 1950. A few years later, my father told me to lie down on a bench in the Sistine Chapel to stare up at Michelangelo’s ceiling … definitely memorable. Generally, however, I was bored.
One of my favorite quotes is from Xun Kuang, a Chinese Confucian philosopher who lived from 312–230 BC, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”. When Penelope took my older son, Danny, to a museum, she would stop him in front of a painting and ask him what the story was. There was no right or wrong answer. There was no one to worry about whether it was what the art historians said the subject was. The story was Danny’s own, and in creating it, he engaged directly with the painting. With our son, Hunter, his mother’s methodology for visiting exhibitions was first a cursory tour during which he had to pick a single work to return to and discuss at length.
Our granddaughter, Boroughs, was 4 years old. She came to visit us during the run of the exhibition “Grounded in Clay” at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. In advance, Penelope had sent her a letter with photos of several of the pots, saying that they would go together on a “treasure hunt” to find them in the show. Armed with the photos, she had no trouble in locating the pieces in the galleries. Watching a video of the artist who discussed one of the pots made by an ancestor she never had the chance to know, Boroughs memorably announced, “She is so sad she is about to cry. Where does she live? I want to visit her and make her feel better.”
Most children don’t have the opportunity to be introduced to the arts by an art historian, but today, there is another means that they may enjoy, and that is AI. Even for adults, the standard museum audio guide only covers “Tell me, and I forget, teach me and I may remember …”, but if AI can grab a child’s imagination, by answering questions or playing a game or actually seeing themselves in an old master painting, then “involve me and I learn” may happen.
I remember the days when I was taken (dragged) from one museum to another because my parents enjoyed museums. As an art dealer, it was my father’s business as well. I do remember some highlights, like being told I was going to see the Mona Lisa at the age of 6 and my disappointment when my father pointed out this small dark picture in an underlit corridor at the Louvre, where it was hung at the time. This was circa 1950. A few years later, my father told me to lie down on a bench in the Sistine Chapel to stare up at Michelangelo’s ceiling … definitely memorable. Generally, however, I was bored.
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