Don’t underrate the power of the small, intricate and intimate

One of the boring things about being a grown-up, I find, is a dull homogeneity of scale. We live, inevitably, in a world where most things are calibrated to the dimensions of the adult human. Even our measurements are based on the proportions of the human body – a thumb’s or arm’s length, a pace, a handful. It could hardly be otherwise (and if it were, it would make daily life frightfully inconvenient).

But compared with the gigantism and miniaturism of the world as experienced by children, it makes for a certain predictability. Unless you work in a field where your business is the study of the immense or the ineffably small, a daily dose of astonishment is hard to maintain.

For children, astonishment needs no maintenance. When you are closer to the ground than to your mother’s face when she stands up, when the family cat is as tall as your waist, and the kitchen table looms above your head, you already inhabit a world of imps and monsters. The notion of a beanstalk robust enough for a giant to swarm up or a tulip opening to reveal a little girl no bigger than a thumb seems entirely plausible.

For grown-ups, any sensation of awe is predicated on a disconcerting return to the childhood feeling of smallness. A cathedral, a mountain, a thunderstorm, a host of golden daffodils feed our sense of the sublime by shrinking us to momentary insignificance.

It rarely works the other way. At best, littleness can be cute; at worst, unnerving, or vaguely malign: “Get you gone, you dwarf / You minimus... / You bead, you acorn!” cries appalled Lysander to his diminutive erstwhile love, Hermia, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his sense of proportion all undone by Puck’s misapplied magic. It seems quite bold, then, for Sotheby’s to be planning a summer sale exclusively devoted to small art. Actual Size, to be held on June 21, includes 20thand 21st-century art with a single quality in common: nothing is larger than the catalogue page on which it is illustrated, at actual size.

The artists’ names may be among the biggest of the past couple of centuries – Klimt, Gauguin, Yves Klein, Marc Chagall – but these are not works to display above a fund manager’s fireplace or an oligarch’s overmantel. They do not impose themselves, they lack the “wow” factor – the bullying ability to hijack the viewer’s regard. They are artworks for people who want art to say something about itself, rather than about them. Their language is that of intimacy and intensity.

In objects, as in people, these are not easy qualities to love: they demand patience, concentration, forbearance. It is easier to succumb to the broad seductions of exuberance and magnificence than to engage with what Sotheby’s calls “the small-scale workings-out that allow us to get close to an artist’s creative process”. That process can be messy, painful and flawed. Frankly, who wants to examine that, in minute detail?

Yet when we are surrounded by large, chaotic events, sometimes smallscale workings-out seem the most eloquent. “Terms such as metonymy, metaphor and allegory… seem to refer to some rare, exotic tongue,” wrote Montaigne. “Yet they are categories which apply to the chatter of your chambermaid.”

So with art. The moment when rhetoric fails is the moment at which the small, the intricate and personal reveals its power.