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.

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    • 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.

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