History of Art: NAIVE ART


	Art Styles in 20th century Art Map NAIVE ART (Nathalia Brodskaia and Viorel Rau)


	see also: Edward Hicks Ammi Phillips Erastus Salisbury Field Henri Rousseau Grandma Moses John Kane Niko Pirosmani Henry Darger Maud Lewis Nina Barka Ivan Generalic Ivan Rabuzin Charles Wysocki Josip Generalic Adrie Martens
	Contents: I. Birth of Naive Art II. Back to the Sources: From the Primitives to Modern Art III. Discoveries in the East Conclusion: Is Naive Art Really Naive?

II. Back to the Sources:

From the Primitives to Modern Art

Primitive Art and Modern Art: Miro's Case

In 1919 Pablo Picasso bought himself a picture by the young Catalan artist Joan Miro. Called Self-Portrait, the picture was painted in a way that gave no hint at all that its originator had spent many years studying art. Instead, it resembled the diligent yet clumsy handiwork of an unskilful village artist. And that was what so captivated Picasso. Self-Portrait marked the beginning of a friendship between the two men.

Based in Paris, Joan Miro went on to enjoy the company of other artistic and cultural luminaries, notably Max Ernst and Andre Masson, the poets Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob and Tristan Tzara, and the critic Maurice Raynal. The artists of the contemporary Paris school were particularly intrigued by Miro's work, believing that they saw in it the rudiments of a new, lively style that might do much to reinvigorate what they had come to think of as the depressingly indolent state of European art.
This, after all, was only a decade or so after the end of the nineteenth century - a time when artists, in despair at the superficiality and falseness of civilised society, had turned their eyes more towards primitive communities of 'natives' and 'savages'. Paul Gauguin, for one, left France altogether in order to try to experience oneness with nature among the people of the Pacific islands, thousands of miles from the soaring cities of his homeland. His intention was to immerse himself in the life and culture of Tahiti in such a way as to reinvent his own artistic style, firmly believing that in their roughly-carved stone idols the Tahitian sculptors were able somehow to express what was beyond the capacities of the more polished art of European studios.

Joan Miro, The Burial

By the time Joan Miro arrived in Paris, however, the young Catalan had already found sources of inspiration much closer to home.
During this period, most of his holidays from school were spent with his maternal grandparents in Palma de Mallorca, the capital of Majorca. Now on the cliffs of Majorca there remain a number of prehistoric paintings and drawings which, in their skilful use of the expressive dynamism of empty space, succeed not only in communicating a distinctive perception of the world but in conveying - through strength of form - the very human sense of pride in power. Joan Miro visited Majorca repeatedly through his life. And it would seem likely that each time he did so, it was consciously or unconsciously to reaffirm his attraction for such large simple forms, for such clean lines and for such natural texture of material.

There were, however, additional sources of inspiration for these facets of Miro's art. "I'll tell you what interests me more than anything else, he said. It is the linear form of a tree or a roofmg-tile - it is gazing at one leaf after another, one twig after another, one clump of grass after another..."' Just as probable that was aroused his passion for paints.

From Medieval to Naive Artists: A Similar Approach?

'Primitive' art may on first consideration seem to bear little relevance to a review of naive art. But there is a connection. It was the energy of this primitive stratum of art which nurtured every naive artist of the twentieth century. More significantly, the naive artists were rescued from their obscurity on the crest of a wave of enthusiasm for all things 'primitive' and all things 'wrong' which had no ties to any specific geographical or chronological framework.
The first stirrings of the swell that was to produce that wave of interest had come centuries earlier, during the Age of Romance.

The Renaissance in Europe relied on a scientific system of pictorial representation that remained the sole criterion of the professional artist until the twentieth century. "A mirror that has a flat surface nonetheless contains a true /three-dimensional/ picture on this surface.
A perfect picture executed on the surface of some flat material should resemble the image in the mirror. Painters, you must therefore think of the mirror's image as your teacher, your guide to chiaroscuro and your mentor for the correct sizing of each object in the picture", wrote Leonardo da Vinci. So rejecting everything that had to do with the realm of sensitivity and intuitive insight, the Renaissance artist revered scientific measurement and precision to such an extent that painting was thoroughly enmeshed in a network of mathematical calculations. Art had indeed become a science.

To the Renaissance artist, all other forms of artistic endeavour - prehistoric art, the art of the early inhabitants of Africa and Oceania, the art of the Oriental peoples, even the homely crafts of rustic fellow Europeans - remained outside the limits of what was true art. The whole body of artistic enterprise that had accumulated during the Middle Ages (with all its cathedrals and religious masterpieces) was similarly not to be regarded as true art. No heed was paid to the fact that the medieval artists genuinely did work to a system - their own contemporary system. The logic went that they were 'primitive' because, principally, they did not profess the religion of perspective. Duccio di Buoninsegna, Cimabue and Giotto - great masters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - were all 'primitives' because their paintings did not present a scientifically-proportioned mirror-image of reality.

The Age of Romance marked the beginning of reconciliation with the 'primitives', the first steps on a return journey. It was not an end in itself for the young Romantic artists. They rejected the traditional classical subjects of paintings, based on Plutarch's Lives, demanding that art become more closely related to reality and contemporary life. The critic Auguste Jal wrote in 1824, "I have been a citizen of Athens, of Carthage and of Latium. Today, what I want is France." All very well, of course, but France would not be France today without the France of yesterday: the past is an intrinsic part of the present.

It was in 1831 that Victor Hugo astounded the world with his presentation in a novel of a Paris completely different from the city of his contemporaries. The book in which he brought it all to life is in English called The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (although the French title is the slightly more prosaic Notre-Dame de Pans), and the Paris he portrayed - specifically the area of Paris known as Notre-Dame - was one that few nineteenth-century Parisians had thought seriously about. "However beautiful the modern Paris might seem to you", wrote Hugo to his readers, "replace it with the Paris of the fifteenth century. Reproduce it in your imagination.
Look at the world anew through an extraordinary forest of spires, turrets and steeples..."' At that time it was a city of two levels, Romanesque and Gothic.1" This was the first occasion in recorded history that a notable commentator was viewing the changes in architecture wrought by the Renaissance as a crime perpetrated on its original, true appearance. The Renaissance era turned out to be intolerant. Not satisfied with creating, it wanted to overturn things. With the fervour of a true Romantic, Hugo railed at previous generations for allowing the grandly mysterious, majestic area of the city to become the travesty of an eyesore it now was. "Such maiming and dismembering, such wholesale changes to the very nature of a building, such perverse 'restoration' work - these are the kinds of things done by the followers of Vitruvius and Vignola Twriters of the standard textbooks on systematic order in classical architecture"!" he thundered.

Not content with pouring scorn on the 'new order', Hugo was fulsome in his praise for the 'primitives'. "This is how magnificent art created by men who cared nothing about what other people thought was destroyed by academics and theorists and line-drawers," he said scathingly,'" then going on to describe the 'magnificent art'. "It is like a huge symphony in stone, a vast work of creative endeavour on the part of humankind ... It is the miraculous result of the combined forces of an entire age, a result by which the energy of a worker influenced by the genius of art bursts forth from every stone, assuming hundreds of forms." The 'worker' he was talking about was a 'naive' artist.

The impact Hugo's words made on others of his generation was tremendous. Many immediately determined to defend and protect national treasures that had till then been altogether excluded from the lists and catalogues of artistic works. The architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc devoted his life thereafter to the accurate restoration of Gothic cathedrals to their original appearance. The writer and playwright Prosper Merimee, who in his other professional life was Inspector of Historic Monuments, was likewise energetic in seeing to the protection and conservation of medieval work.s of art, notably mille-fleurs tapestries. Thanks to him the Musee de Cluny in Paris came into possession of the magnificent Lady and the Unicorn series of tapestries now famous the world over. And from then on, museums and collections in France began deliberately to acquire and display the works of the previously-ignored 'primitives'.

In due course, an exhibition of medieval French art was staged in Paris in 1904. It brought the world of the 'primitives' to the next generation of artists - to Picasso and Matisse, to Vlaminck and Derain, to the very people who were a few years later themselves to introduce Henri Rousseau to the artistic community.

Naive Art Sources: From Popular Tradition to Photography

Naive Artists and Folk Art

A naive artist creates singular and inimitable works of art. This is because, for the most part, the naive artist is not a professional artist but has a quite separate occupation by which he or she earns a living, in which he or she relies on a totally different set of skills in which he or she may be expert enough to achieve considerable job satisfaction), and which takes up much of his or her daily life. The twentieth century has seen many a 'Sunday artist' who has attracted imitators and patrons but who has never ceased to look at the world through the eyes of his or her workaday occupation. Particularly characteristic of them is an artisan's diligence and pride in the works of art they produce. They are taking their 'professional' attitude towards their workaday occupation and transferring it on to their creations. They have no access to elite artistic circles, and would not be accepted by them if they had. The naive artists thus live in a small world, often a provincial world, a world that has its own artisans - the producers of folk art.

Some say that folk artists have for centuries repeated the same forms using the same colours in the same style, and are doomed therefore endlessly to reproduce the same subjects in their art and to the same standards. But folk artists do not only produce traditional forms of applied art - they also make shop-signs and colourfully ornate panels for stalls and rides at fairs. And although these artisans' work is rooted in their own form of expertise, it is often very difficult to draw a distinct line to separate their work from that of naive artists. Sometimes, after all, the power in the coloration, the sense of modernity and the feel for line and form in an artisan-made sign can elevate it to the level of an outstanding and individual work of art. At the same time it should be remembered that when Henri Rousseau or Niko Pirosmani painted a restaurant sign or was commissioned by neighbours to depict a wedding in their house or their new cart in the barn, the resultant piece would be considered by all to be an artisan's work.

In Russia, the painted sign has always enjoyed a special status, and those who are exceptionally talented at producing them deserve recognition as genuine naive artists. "A sign in Russia has no equivalent in Western cultures", wrote the artist David Burliuk in 1913. "The utter illiteracy of our people [and he was being quite serious at the time has made it an absolute necessity as a means of communication between shopkeeper and customer. In the Russian sign the folk genius for painting has found its only outlet." A multitude of bylaws and regulations governed the size and shape and even the look of signs in urban environments. It was the inventive capacity of the creators that helped them find a way through the maze of restrictions. By the end of the nineteenth century the best of the sign-painters were putting their names to their works: one or two were even making a reputation for themselves.

At the turn of the twentieth century one name that became well known in St Petersburg in this way was that of Konstantin Grushin. His work on behalf of the shopkeepers of the city included magnificent still-lifes of fruit and vegetables, and picturesque landscapes with bulls or birds.
Signs were supposed to be painted against a black border. Despite this regulation, the painter Yevfimiy Ivanov managed to produce works of art that truly befitted such a description. His style was free and broad, his composition uninhibited yet expert.

Notwithstanding the fact that the functional nature of signs imposed upon them a certain need for a quality of flatness and ornamentation, each artist dealt with this requirement in his or her own way. A panel meant to advertise Shabarshin's Furniture Delivery Services, for example, painted by the talented Konstantin Filippov, may be called a sign only because there are words on it. In all other respects it is an easel-painting. Powerfully-portrayed draught-horses are set against a delicately refined backdrop. The wheels and harnesses of the horses are meticulously executed. In overall style this work is typical of urban naive artists, reminiscent of the famous The Cart of Father Juniel by Henri Rousseau.

Ready-to-wear clothes shops were particularly blessed in the quality of their signs. Vasily Stepanov's advertising signs for the shops of a certain Mr Kuzmin featured fashionably-dressed ladies and gentlemen, but he made them look as if they had been asked to sit for ceremonial portraits, virtually in salon style. Stepanov did, however, include some elements of parody. Singular in themselves and yet typical of their kind, these signs were supremely representative of their time and their location, and as such constitute a sort of historical document.

It was no wonder that signs like these were prized so highly by the artists of the Russian avant-garde - the artists of Picasso's generation - that they started to collect them. The poet Benedikt Livshitz wrote, "A burning desire for things primitive, and especially for the signs painted to advertise provincial establishments of such trades as laundry, hairdressing, and so on - as had had a profound effect on Larionov, Goncharova and Chagall - caused Burliuk to spend all the money he had on buying signs created by artisans... For Burliuk it was not simply a matter of satiating a temporary whim involving a fad for folk art, a sudden craze for the primitive in all its manifestations, such as the art of Polynesia or ancient Mexico. No, this enthusiasm was far more profound."

Reflecting on the origins of the interest of the avant-garde in primitive art as a whole, Livshitz quoted an eloquent statement by the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk: "There has been no progress whatsoever in art - has been none, and never will be any! Etruscan statues of the gods are in no way inferior to those of [the ancient Athenian] Phidias. Each era has the right to believe that it initiates a Renaissance."
Historical circumstances delayed the onset of the industrial revolution in Russia. The chaos that surrounded the political Revolution hindered the authorities from re-establishing in urban centres for some considerable time. Nevertheless, the production of the traditional shop-signs continued for a while not only in rural areas but also in St Petersburg and in Moscow. The German philosopher and diarist Walter Benjamin, who endeavoured to create a written 'portrait' of contemporary Moscow, inscribed in his diary on 13 December 1926, "Here, just as in Riga, they have wonderful painted signs - shoes falling out of a basket, a Pomeranian /Spitz dogj running off with a sandal between his jaws. In front of one Turkish restaurant there are two signs set like a diptych featuring a picture of gentlemen wearing fezzes with crescents on them sitting at a laid table."

Painted shop-signs eventually disappeared. They became unnecessary, too expensive in time and cost, thanks to the arrival of the machine-dominated world in which everything could be produced mechanically and where there was no place left - in the severely insensitive urban environment - for naive art that came from the heart. During the decades of the Soviet Union, some naive artists continued to paint privately, deep within a closed family circle invohing only family members and trusted neighbours who went on thinking of them as artists. Others joined the numerous art studios, so leaving the ranks of the naive while yet not being accepted into the ranks of the professional artists.

The popular Russian magazine Ogonyok has from time to time included prints of works of art by 'ordinary people'. In 1987 its readers were introduced to the pictures of Yelena Volkova. Brought up on an island not far from the Ukrainian city of Chuguyev, she tended to concentrate on painting riverside trees with bright green foliage, other scenes featuring people and animals, and equally colourful still-lifes. The disparate elements of everyday existence combine in Volkova's art to produce works that have much of the idyllic in them - a trait characteristic of many (and quite possibly all) naive artists. A generally happy world is painted to portray that happiness, only in a brighter, richer, yet more serene way.

Yelena Volkova came to painting at a mature age, but her creative imagination draws on her childhood memories, particularly those filled with the dazzling colours of the village fairs. Folk crafts were still blossoming in Russia in those days. Pottery, lacework, wooden toys and household articles, and so forth, were an integral part of ordinary rural life. Unhappily, today many of these traditions have been irretrievably lost. Yet aesthetic notions that derive from them continue to have some influence not only in rural districts but in urban areas too.

Eccentric personages who have a driving passion for painting pictures in their spare time should not automatically be associated with folk arts and crafts, however. On the contrary, such an association remains relatively rare by the end of the twentieth century. For one thing, whatever the conscious intentions of naive artists are when they create their works of art, it is their own interests - their own choice of subject matter and presentation - that they are realising. In that respect, such interests, influenced, for instance by the kitsch environment of a city market, remain the same no matter what or where the city is, no matter even if the city is Paris and the artists regularly visit the Louvre. But where this association between naive art and folk art has been established in an artist, is it possible to distinguish the different elements in the artist's work, to differentiate between the art of naive art and the kitsch of the city-market folk art?
National characteristics manifest themselves in a much more powerful way in the sort of naive art that is closely associated with folk art than in the unified classical system of art. Their presence is more evident where such an association remains intimate, most often in the work of rural artists, and less evident in the sanitised environment of a big city. Anatoly Yakovsky has suggested that a fondness for folk art is more noticeable in a country that has undergone a sudden transition from the era of the artisan to the age of the modern industrial complex.

This would explain how it is that in some of the Latin American countries, for instance, or in Haiti, where there has been a synthesis of a darkly pagan religion with no less primitive forms of Christianity, enthusiasts have searched for and found naive paintings of outstanding quality The works of the Brazilian and Haitian naive artists retain an essentially Brazilian or Haitian feel to them because their connection with the assorted influences of local religions and crafts has not yet loosened.
Back at that threshold between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Russia was in the process of becoming an industrial power in Europe, yet its virtually medieval artistic craftsmanship remained pretty well unchanged. The diarist Walter Benjamin (quoted above) was astounded by the multicoloured diversity of life on the Moscow streets:

"Women - dealers and peasant-farmers - set up their baskets with their wares in front of them... The baskets are full of apples, sweets, nuts, sugary confections... It is still possible here to find people whose baskets contain wooden toys, small carts and spades. The carts are yellow and red, the spades are yellow or red... All the toys are simpler and more robust than in Germany - their rustic origins are very plain to see. On one street corner I encountered a woman who was selling Christmas-tree decorations. The glass spheres, yellow and red, were shining in the sun as if she was holding a magic basket of apples, some yellow and some red. In this place -as in some others I have been to - I could feel a direct connection between wood and colour." It was this multicoloured Russia which at the beginning of the twentieth century provided the impetus for a rejuvenation of painting, a new palette for the pictures of Boris Kustodiev, Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Ilya Mashkov, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Aristarkh Lentulov and Marc Chagall, together with those of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. And it was here, among its thronging city streets and markets, at the junction of East and West, where talented but untaught painters were devising and executing their own works of art. The artists 'discovered' by Larionov could hardly be compared with Niko Pirosmani - but the point is: they existed!

Gheorghe Coltet, The Ox-Cart

One of them has since become fairly well known. Morris Hirshfield was born in 1870 in what is now Poland but was then part of the Russian Empire. His pictures very much reflect the rural tastes of Polish life at the time, and feature clay cat-shaped money-boxes, wall-hangings with butterflies and flowers, and nudes.
The pictures of Camille Bombois also have a lot to do with fairs (at once stage he earned his living as a wrestler in a travelling circus), only for the most part those of Paris. His vigorous depictions of athletes, circus shows and nude models are the very embodiment of Parisian street life of the time.
For clear evidence of national traits in the work of naive artists we need look no further than Krsto Hegedusic. His intention was specifically to identify the roots of Croatian art, and to encourage works that represented those roots. The result was not so much an artistic school that he founded at the village of Hlebin as a collection of individual talents all working according to similar precepts. Brightest among his proteges was Ivan Generalic.

Generalic was born in 1914, and for various reasons received only four years of formal education. He started painting on wood and glass - as was the custom in Balkan villages - and only later took to watercolour and oil painting on paper and canvas. In his approach to art he Zahiu was a classic 'Sunday artist'. "Generalic is a peasant - a real peasant - who does all the work in the fields and in the vineyard himself", wrote Robert Wildhaber, who visited Generalic in search of folk art objects to display in his museum in Basel. "When he has time, and in moments of inspiration, he sits and paints on the very table on which he served us our dinner... His bedroom he uses as a picture gallery His own paintings hang there interspersed with photographs. His custom is to paint on glass - only rarely does Generalic work on wood. It is quite delightful how this thickset giant of a man with the strong hands of a peasant is apt to explain that the wood of a tree is hard, and he does not always feel its inner warmth, but that he always feels the inner warmth in glass."

This last comment is especially interesting. Painting on glass has long been a traditional form of folk art not only in the Balkans but also in Switzerland, in France, in Germany and in the Ukraine, whereas painting on wood has been the standard form for village craftsmen and icon-painters all over Europe and in much of the world besides. It is natural, then, that wood and glass tend to be the media on which naive artists paint their first works, if not all subsequent works. Most of the talented rural painters of Hlebin have therefore continued to paint in oil on glass for the duration of their creative life; rarely have they ever crossed over to canvas. The connection with traditional, local arts and crafts by no means disqualifies village artists of anywhere in the world from the worldwide community of naive artists. Such rural pictures have every right to be regarded as a genuine easel-painting and to be compared with those of Rousseau. Rustic artists acquired their devotees and their patrons, and their works have become prominent in some museum collections.

In the comparatively small but diversely populated country of Switzerland, located right in the centre of Europe, there has long been concern that forms of folk art might disappear under the manifold pressures of industrial society. This is an area where the traditions of folk art exist perhaps less at the level of the nation than at the level of the canton: not only the artists themselves but the cantonal authorities too are much concerned to preserve what they can of their local culture.
Oil painting on glass (and in particular, the works of Rene Auberjonois, of Lausanne) has received some notable commendation from 'professional' artists, which constitutes formidable support for it. Artists of truly rustic traditions, however, have tended to paint in oil or watercolour on cardboard, and their primary subject matter has been the cows going up to an Alpine meadow. The oldest extant examples of paintings like this date back to the 1700s, although it is more than probable that such scenes really go back hundreds of years and focus on a geographical area surrounding the Santis mountain group in the east of Switzerland, on the Liechtenstein border. Sharp outlines and an individual sense of colour in these works make them reminiscent of the Russian lubok. Unlike a lubok, however, each Swiss scene is signed by its artist, and the names of some Swiss artists of this sort have been known since the nineteenth century. Nor have they been forgotten in the meantime, thanks to their individual style and perception of the world.

One of them was Conrad Starck, perhaps most famous for the painted scene with which he decorated a milking-pail. Typifying the local Swiss scenery as he knew it, there is a cow, slung around the neck of which is a huge cow-bell; there is a rustic labourer wearing a red waistcoat above yellow trews; a rather sketchy tree; and some dogs, without which no Swiss mountain-farmer could work. This somewhat stereotyped though uninhibited approach by the artist is of course excused by the fact that it is all simply decoration for a milking-pail. Very much the same stock subjects are included also in another painting upon yet another milking-pail bv Bartolomaus Lemmer in 1850, although the painting is totally different. The labourer is striding forward with a confident gait, a pipe between his teeth, followed by a shabby dog. A group of large, not to say fierce, cattle charge towards him in the background. Such functional decoration is rarely painted with distinctive expressiveness or freedom. Many rural artists painted virtually nothing else but cows going up to an Alpine meadow, strangely clean farms, herds of goats and pigs, and the occasional yokel on a mountainside But each artist had his or her own way of painting. For the most part the pictures were neither sensational nor innovative, especially when an artist was deliberately following an older, traditional style. Sometimes, just sometimes, the style is broad and free - a reminder that the artist has truly been part of the twentieth century. In this dual way the artists have created an image of their country that is comparatively modern and have yet preserved the spirit of the art of their tradition. To paraphrase the words of one of Henri Rousseau's defenders in the Salon des independants, 'It is unreasonable to believe that people who are capable of affecting us in such a powerful way are not artists.'

Branko Babunek, The Village Square, 1974

Naive Artists and Photography

The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth gave naive artists another source of inspiration. By this period photography had become so practicable that photographs - of parents, of brothers and sisters, of children and grandchildren, of entire family groups - decorated the walls of houses. This is the way it was in Ivan Generality's house. For many people, from the time photography began to 'compete' with painting, the qualities of a photograph represented aesthetic criteria. The result was that some artists were simply defeated by it. Others, like Edgar Degas, turned the world-view as seen through the lens of the camera to their own advantage.

Now it was possible to commission from the local artist a portrait of your child which should 'look like a photo', because photography had that unique ability to catch and retain an image with the honesty of a mirror. No idealisation was allowed, and the scrupulous rendition of every little detail of a face or of clothing was not only mandatory but tended to influence the poses people took up and the overall composition of the picture.

It is often because they reflect the standards of photography that pictures produced by otherwise very different naive artists - a French Rousseau, say, a Georgian Pirosmani, an Italian Metelli or a Polish Nikifor - may look similar. Rousseau's portrait of a female figure that was purchased by Picasso, and even the Self-Portrait by Joan Miro, conformed in many ways to the aesthetics of photography - not perhaps to those of genuine artists with the camera but to those of the photographers at fairs, who sat their models one after another on the same plain chair in front of the same velvet curtain.

Whereas reproductions and prints of paintings were not widely available, photography soon became an established part of urban and rural life. Photographers were to be found at bazaars and fairs among the stalls of folk arts such as painted pottery and crockery, woven baskets and rugs, and wooden artefacts. Photography entered every house as a form of art. Its influence on what people thought of 'art' is simply impossible to ignore. Naive artists probably mastered the lessons of photography before the pros and cons of the medium in relation to professional art were fully appreciated by professional artists.