naive art

naive art. Term applied to painting (and to a much lesser degree sculpture) produced in more or less sophisticated societies but lacking conventional expertise in representational skills. Colours are characteristically bright and non-naturalistic, perspective non-scientific, and the vision childlike or literal-minded. The term ‘primitive’ is sometimes used more or less synonymously with naive, but this can be confusing, as ‘primitive’ is also applied loosely to paintings of the pre-Renaissance era as well as to art of ‘uncivilized’ societies. Other terms that are sometimes used in a similar way are ‘folk’, ‘popular’, or ‘Sunday painters’, but these too have their pitfalls, not least ‘Sunday painter’, for many amateurs do not paint in a naive style, and naive artists (at least the successful ones) often paint as a full-time job. Sophisticated artists may also deliberately affect a naive style, but this ‘false naivety’ (faux naïf) is no more to be confused with the spontaneous quality of the true naive than the deliberately childlike work of say Klee or Picasso is to be confused with genuine children's drawing. Naive art has a quality of its own that is easy to recognize but hard to define. Scottie Wilson summed it up when he said, ‘It's a feeling you cannot explain. You're born with it and it just comes out.’

Naive art, as the term is now generally understood, developed in the 19th century (before then, pictures that have a naive quality might more reasonably be classified as folk art or simply as amateurish works) and the first notable exponent was perhaps the American Edward Hicks. It was not until the early years of the 20th century, however, that there was a vogue for naive art. Henri Rousseau was the first naive painter to win serious critical recognition and he remains the only one who is regarded as a great master, but many others have won an honourable place in modern art. The critic Wilhelm Uhde was mainly responsible for putting naive painters on the map in the years after the First World War. At first their freshness and directness of vision appealed mainly to fellow artists, but a number of major group exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s helped to develop public taste for them, notably ‘Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1938.

Most of the early naive painters to make reputations were French (mainly because Uhde was active in discovering and promoting them in France); they included Bauchant, Bombois, Séraphine, and Vivin. In Britain the best-known figures include Beryl Cook and Henry Wallis (two painters who show the huge difference of approach and style that can exist between artists given the same label). L. S. Lowry is also often claimed as a naive painter, but some critics regard him as outside this classification because of his many years of study at art school. In the USA the leading figures include John Kane and Grandma Moses. The richest crop of naive painters, however, has been in Croatia, where Ivan Generalić has been the most famous figure. Haiti is also particularly noteworthy in that naive painting has been the country's central tradition in modern art, stemming from the success of Hector Hyppolite.