"Dad, can we go to see that?"
We were walking through the streets of Milan, dodging the usual afternoon foot traffic, when my eight-year-old daughter stopped and pointed. It wasn't a toy store or a gelato stand. It was a street poster promoting an exhibition of Leonora Carrington paintings.
If you aren't familiar with Carrington, her work is heavily surrealist. It features mythical creatures, bizarre proportions, and dreamlike landscapes that challenge the viewer to abandon reason. For most adults, it requires a lot of chin-stroking and reading of the little placards on the museum wall to figure out what it all "means."
For a child in the third grade, however, the request to see it was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, I've come to realize that she and her friends understand "difficult" art much better than we adults do.
When you look at the world through the eyes of an eight-year-old, the boundaries of reality are already wonderfully flexible. They live half their lives in books, comic books, and imaginative play. Why wouldn't a painting of a giant badger stirring a cauldron make perfect sense?
In her world, modern art isn't an intimidating academic exercise. It's just a cast of characters. Wassily Kandinsky? He’s basically an old friend who really likes playing with geometry sets. Pablo Picasso is just a slightly eccentric guy who couldn't decide which way his subjects were facing. And Gustav Klimt’s famous painting, The Kiss? Well, to an eight-year-old, that much public affection is highly embarrassing, obviously.
But there was something about Leonora Carrington that completely captured her attention. From the moment we entered the exhibition, she was drawn into the pictures in a way I hadn't seen before. She didn't ask me to explain the historical context of the surrealist movement. She just stepped into the strange worlds Carrington had painted, entirely at home among the oddity.
Children haven't spent decades building up rigid logical walls. They don't try to solve a surrealist painting like it’s an equation that has a single, correct answer. They just experience it.
Of course, this profound cultural afternoon had a very predictable conclusion. When we finally reached the inevitable museum shop at the exit, she would not take no for an answer.
So now, Leonora Carrington is a permanent fixture in our daily lives. If you visit our apartment in Milan today, you will find Grandmother Moorhead's Aromatic Kitchen—a wonderfully bizarre masterpiece—hanging proudly on the wall in our very own kitchen.
It is a daily reminder that sometimes, the best way to understand the world is to stop trying to make sense of it, and just let a third-grader show you around.