No, your pet monkey couldn’t have painted that Pollock.

And if you’re planning on visiting the Abstract Expressionist exhibit at the AGO this summer, you can rest assured: Your four-year-old with a paintbrush won’t come close to the Willem de Kooning hanging in front of you.

Research by Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner, of the Psychology Department at Boston College, suggests that even the untrained eye can distinguish between paintings by abstract expressionists and similar works thrown to canvas by monkeys, elephants and children.

“I was talking to my adviser about the common claim that when a lot of people look at abstract expressionism they say that a child could do it, that there is no skill or intentionality or planning,” explained Hawley-Dolan in an interview with the Star.

The two set about to devise a test to see if this was true.

For the study, 30 paintings by revered abstract expressionists were matched with works by zoo animals and children.

“The paintings were matched along line, colour, brush stoke and medium,” explains Hawley-Dolan. “Each image had to share in two of those aspects.”

For example, Laburnum by the revered Hans Hofmann was paired with schoolroom scribbles by four-year-old Jack Pezanosky.

Undergraduate students were then asked to judge the pairs of paintings on the basis of which they preferred and which they thought were done by a pro.

The 32 art-studio students and 40 psychology students were first shown paintings with the artists’ signatures removed. They were then shown paintings that were incorrectly and then correctly labelled, with signs indicating that the painting was painted by an artist or an exotic pet.

In all cases, over 60 per cent of the students were able to choose the paintings done by professionals, regardless of whether their studies were focused in that area.

“The art students weren’t affected by labels at all,” says Hawley-Dolan. “For the non-art students, their preferences were not affected by the labels, but their judgments were.”

When shown the correct label on a painting, the psychology students were more likely to say that a professional had painted the work.

However, when the paintings were mislabelled — when an elephant was given credit for a Mark Rothko, for instance — the students weren’t swayed. They still chose the pro around the same number of times as when the paintings weren’t labelled.

There was also a discrepancy when it came to which paintings the students preferred. The art students’ picks for professional artists largely mirrored the painting they favoured. When presented with correctly labelled paintings, however, 79 per cent of the psych students named them as professional, while only 58 per cent said they preferred the professional painting.

So how do we identify artists as professional, when both the monkey and the professional have delivered something that looks like scribbles on a page?

“When talking about judgment, when they were looking at the professional images, both the psychology and art students talked more about intention, like ‘this brush stroke looks more planned’,” says Hawley-Dolan. “They would talk about colours and how the maker planned the colours. They made reference to . . . seeing the mind behind the art.”

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The study suggests that what sets a professional painter apart from an animal or a child is the viewers’ ability to see the thought that went into the painting. But that doesn’t mean we prefer it.

And as Hawley-Dolan points out, “We can look at the study as a glass half full or half empty. It is hard to tell apart the work of a child and a professional artist (the studies participants got it wrong on average 40 per cent of the time). That is what people often say, and part of the time that’s true.”