Related to Toys
Dolls, tops, teddy bears, model worlds and building bricks in art, as signs of childhood and as materials for adult unease.
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Toys have long appeared in art as markers of childhood and its brief freedoms. Jean-Siméon Chardin's Boy with a Top (1738) watches a well-dressed boy absorbed in a spinning top, and Francisco Goya's The Straw Manikin (1791–92) shows young women tossing a limp dummy in a blanket, a game with a sharp edge. Alexander Calder built a miniature Cirque Calder (1926–31) from wire, cloth and cork and performed it for friends.
Later artists turned playthings into something stranger. Mike Kelley stitched worn secondhand soft toys into a large hanging in More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), drawing out the debts of love attached to handmade gifts. Ydessa Hendeles gathered thousands of old photographs of people posing with teddy bears. After an assault, Mark Hogancamp built a one-sixth-scale Second World War village, Marwencol, and photographed its dolls acting out stories. Nathan Sawaya builds life-size figures from LEGO bricks.
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