naive art

naive art. Term applied to painting (and to a much lesser degree sculpture) produced in more or less sophisticated Western or Westernized 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 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 effect 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 (1780–1849), famous for his religious scenes (he was a Quaker preacher). It was not until the early years of the 20th century, however, that there has been 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 first significant collector of naive art was the French humorous writer Georges Courteline (1858–1929), whose collection in his Paris home was illustrated in the satirical magazine Cocorico in August 1900. However, it was the critic Wilhelm Uhde—in the years after the First World War—who was mainly responsible for putting naive painters on the map. 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: they included the exhibition of Courteline's collection at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, in 1927; ‘Maîtres Populaires de la Réalité', shown at the Salle Royal, Paris, in 1937 and then at the Kunsthaus, Zurich; and ‘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, Jean Eve (1900–68), Jules Lefranc (1887–1972), Dominique Peyronnet (1872–1943), René Rimbert (1896––?), Séraphine, and Vivin. By the middle of the century, however, most countries had their share of such painters. They included the Belgian Léon Greffe (1881–1949), the German Paps, the Greek Theophilos, the Italian Orneore Metelli, the Pole Nikifor, the Spaniard Miguel Vivancos, and the Swiss Adolf Dietrich. In Britain the best-known figures include Beryl Cook and Alfred Wallis (two painters who show the huge difference of approach and style that can exist betwen 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 Morris Hirschfield, John Kane, Grandma Moses, and Horace Pippin. Haiti is noteworthy in that naive painting has been the country's central tradition in 20th-century art, the leading figures including Wilson Bigaud, Hector Hyppolite, and Pierre Monosiet (1922–83), who was first director of the Musée d'Art Haitien in Port-au-Prince from 1972 until his death. The richest crop of naive painters, however, has been in the former Yugoslavia (mainly Croatia). Ivan Generalić is the most famous figure; others include Franjo Filipović (1930– ), Ivan Lacković (1932– ), Franjo Mraz, Ivan Rabuzin, and Mirko Virius. A Gallery of Primitive Art was founded in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, in 1952, and there are other museums in the country specializing in naive art.

The Yugoslavian painters are unusual in that they have concentrated around four main centres: Hlebine (see HLEBINE SCHOOL), Kovačica, Oparić, and Uzdin. In many other countries, naive painters have worked in isolation from each other and from the orthodox art production around them. They are extremely diverse in both their habits and their work. Some have shown an interest in painting since childhood, others have taken it up in middle age or late in life. From necessity or choice many of them have been spare-time artists, painting for their own pleasure while earning a living by other means. Many have been interested primarily in depicting scenes and incidents from the daily life around them. These have often given great attention to realistic detail, rendering each feature with painstaking precision, whether or not it could in actuality be so seen within the image as a whole. Others have given free rein to imagination and fantasy, sometimes with an almost Surrealistic effect. The traditional principles of perspective usually go by the board, though many naive artists are capable of rendering distance and depth by their own means. So-called ‘psychological’ perspective is a prominent feature of much naive painting, the relative size of figures and objects being determined by psychological interest without regard to natural proportions. As in the case of Rousseau, naive painters have often been admired for qualities in their work of which they themselves were unaware. If it is possible to point to any quality which the best naive work has in common with that of sophisticated artists, it is a power of pictorial construction (lacking almost always in the work of children and psychotics) and a power to invest the depiction of the commonplace and familiar with poetic freshness. The cult of naive painting, however, has perhaps led to the overrating of much work, for the truly outstanding naive painter is probably as rare as the truly outstanding artist in any other field. When their work acquires financial value, there is the danger—as happened to some extent in Yugoslavia during the late 1960s—that naive painters begin to repeat themselves, with a consequent loss of spontaneity in their work.