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There is an episode of Hey Duggee, a British children's animation, called 'The Art Badge.' The main episodic theme of this piece is the world famous Frieze Art Fair, and different world famous art works and artists are overtly visually referenced throughout the minifilm, which is essential to understanding and appreciating it properly. I would like to use this film in an EFL lesson about both art and British culture.

I have been able to identify My bed by Tracey Emin, and The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, and references to Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt, and Andy Warhol. What other artworks and artists are being alluded to in this episode?

The episode is available here:

The art references start at 1.25.

[I am particularly interested in what is being referenced by the pencil drawn acorn at 4.53].

Yes, this is a childrens' television programme, but as other childrens television and film occasionally do have, it has quite a lot of cultural significance.

Here is a scene from the day of the show. Most of the works referenced appear here. Some of the artworks are quite small. For example, there is a famous lobster-shaped telephone (by???) next to the tiger at the very bottom.

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Here are a couple of references missing from that scene (Warhol, Klimt, Picasso, Emin):

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Going from top left to bottom right, there are references to Albrecht Dürer, Banksy, Leonardo da Vinci, Edvard Munch, Gilbert & George, Jackson Pollock, Frida Kahlo, David Hockney, Wassily Kandinsky/Kazimir Malevich, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Piet Mondriaan, Yayoi Kusama, Salvador Dalí, Damien Hirst, Sandro Botticelli, and Cassius Marcellus Coolidge:

enter image description here Click image for larger version

The referenced artworks are the following:

enter image description here Click image for larger version

Some notes:

  • The image of the acorn reminds me of Albrecht Dürer, but I'm not sure it's a direct reference. Dürer did have a tendency to draw his objects isolated and very precisely, hence this interpretation.
  • Gilbert & George's is not a direct reference to any particular work.
  • The painting with the triangles is probably a suprematist artwork, and is referencing either Wassily Kandinsky or, more likely, Kazimir Malevich.
  • Andy Warhol's is a clever combination of his typical repetitive silk screen prints and the iconic Velvet Underground & Nico album cover (the banana also being the favourite subject of a monkey character from the Hey Duggee series).
  • The ice cream cone sculpture could refer to Claes Oldenburg, who made a lot of sculptures of over-sized mundane objects (most famously a hamburger).
  • Oh, and the Lobster Telephone is by surrealist Salvador Dalí.

After finding the episode online (and correcting some initial guesses), I only found the following reference to be missing in the overview picture:

enter image description here
This Droste effect, or mise en abyme, may simply suggest the conceptual and self-referencing nature of (post) modern art, but is likely inspired by Paul Magritte's wonderful 'Not to be Reproduced'.
There is a similar small painting in the overview, center bottom, featuring what seems to be an egg, which could also be based on a Magritte, namely La Clairvoyance, or even Elective Affinities.

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  • I think there's still two missing. There's the sand sculpture underneath the Oldenburg and the Japanese(?) teapot underneath the poodle (I had thought about Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, but I don't really know why)
    – Araucaria - Not here any more.
    Commented Jun 9, 2020 at 18:02
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I think also there is a reference to 'jeff koons' - 'balloon dog' bear made it.

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