Marbles XI 1984

Charles Bell made this painting of marbles, Marbles XI, using oil paint. In its flawless realism, the image shows a collection of marbles, the kind you might find in any American childhood between the 1950s and the 1980s. In that period, and in that country, these brightly coloured glass spheres were a feature of playgrounds and classrooms, their relative worth the subject of intense negotiations. The composition seems to respond to the formal language of abstract expressionism, its apparently artless arrangement belying a sophisticated compositional structure. Are these spheres a comment on the social structures of their time? Are they a critique of the art institutions? The interpretation of art is contingent on the social and institutional context. To understand this image better, we might start by looking at the history of American childhood, and the market for toys and games in the late twentieth century.