A year or two ago, I first saw a “feminist coloring book for children” mentioned in the media – where else but in The Guardian? I thought the thing was a facetious outlier but it’s becoming mainstream. More than that, I admit that a feminist coloring book could actually do some good in a lot of places where women are obviously treated as imperfectly human: most, excepting some enclaves, are located outside the West.
Now I’ve come across a Hieronymus Bosch coloring book. I even had a chance to flip through a copy, on sale next to a large Bosch exhibition in one of Europe’s greatest museums. By the German artist Sabine Tauber, published by Prestel. It goes both ways then: blown-up pages from coloring books grace the walls of many a gallery.
Is there a Kazimir Malevich or a Barnett Newman colouring book? I’m lazy.
Malevich went back to figurative painting after the Black Square phase, the apex of his Suprematist period. Barnett Newman and Mondrian will probably appeal to some children – perhaps a niche market, the geometrically gifted. Other kids may get excited by Bosch’s little monsters, but he conceived most of them as infernal creatures.