Jake and Dinos Chapman, My Giant Colouring Book 5, 2004

I wonder how Jake and Dinos Chapman would have reacted had someone told them in 2004 that their etchings defacing children colouring books would end up being shown in a cozy family exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood. Amusingly, the curators placed the works at children’s level so you have to bend down to have a look at them. Children, however, are too busy running around the train models, teddy bears and robot displays to care about the exhibition Jake and Dinos Chapman: My Giant Colouring Book

Jake and Dinos Chapman, My Giant Colouring Book 9, 2004

Jake and Dinos Chapman, My Giant Colouring Book 20, 2004

Jake and Dinos Chapman, My Giant Colouring Book 21, 2004

The Chapman brothers are know (among many other pleasantly shocking coups) for the way they vandalized works such as Goya prints and Hitler’s watercolours.

Most of the etchings on view at the museum are based loosely on join-the-dots drawings from children’s picture books. Except that the artists strayed from the assigned dot-to-dot path and devised a word of their own. The subjects include sabre-toothed owls, psychedelic grinning cats and bears trapped in the belly of the Loch Ness monster. In describing the series, Dinos Chapman said: “(They) are about how wrong you could make an image.”

Jake and Dinos Chapman, My Giant Colouring Book, 2004

Jake and Dinos Chapman, My Giant Colouring Book, 2004

Jake and Dinos Chapman: My Giant Colouring Book is up at V&A Museum of Childhood in London to January 8 2012.