Should art galleries be off limits to children?

This week, as is his want, Jake Chapman threw a Picasso inspired cat among the pigeons.

The artist, best known along with brother Dinos for his controversial and often explicit installations, said that museums and art galleries were no place for children and any parent who thought otherwise was guilty of arrogance. In fact, he went further, adding that standing a child in front of a Jackson Pollock was “moronic”.

God knows what he would make then of the mother who regularly brings her small baby to The Hepworth Wakefield and always makes a beeline for the galleries containing some of the American painter’s abstract works.

“I saw her yesterday and after what Jake Chapman had said, I had to ask her what she got out of bringing her baby here,” says Hepworth’s head of learning Natalie Walton. “I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect response. Without prompting she said that she notices a definite difference in her baby when they are in front of the Pollocks, something to do perhaps with the contrasting colours.”

Chapman may well have had mother and baby unceremoniously frogmarched out of the Wakefield gallery, but for Natalie, it was confirmation of the importance of introducing people to art at an early age.

“I grew up in Gateshead. I come from a working class background,” she says. “None of my mum’s side went to university, but my dad’s side of the family does have a creative streak and from quite an early age my parents took me to museums and art galleries.

“The school I went to never organised those kind of trips, so I was really lucky to grow up in the family I did. I remember going to Sunderland Art Gallery, which was quite traditional in terms of its focus on paintings. I’ll never forget seeing a work by LS Lowry and making instant connections with his painting and the industrial landscape where I had grown up.

“Looking at the figures he’d painted we made up a thousand stories of who they were and what they might have been doing. It really was like magic.”

Natalie took up the post of head of learning 14 months before the gallery opened in 2011 and spent much of that time asking the local community what they wanted from their new gallery.

“There was a bit of resistance to the design and a definite feeling that this somehow wasn’t going to be for them. Part of my job is to break down those barriers because you only need to say ‘this isn’t for you’ once to put someone off for life.

“There are a lot of adults who feel incredibly self-conscious about going into an art gallery, they worry that they are somehow not doing it right. Children don’t have any of those inhibitions, their imagination takes over. These are the art gallery visitors of tomorrow and if we don’t make them welcome now we could lose them forever. One of the really nice things about the last few years is that we now see those families, who were initially reluctant, coming back time and again to take part in the free activities.”

Chapman’s main beef seemed to be that children simply can’t appreciate the finer points of art. However, as many have since pointed out, art isn’t about understanding, it’s about experiencing. “Of course children don’t come here with an extensive knowledge of art history but I’m not sure that it matters,” says Natalie, who has just finished building dens outside on the lawn as part of the national Playday. “It’s about see things from different angles, it’s about a child’s visual and developmental skills.

“I asked two little brothers what they would do if I told them they weren’t allowed in the gallery because they were kids. Without a pause, one turned to me and said, ‘Well I’d walk out, go put on some adult clothes and walk right back in again’. Take that Jake Chapman.”