There is a colourful world filled with fabulous details, where everything seems peacefully flying and takes a person back to his childhood, evoking coziest memories. That’s the world of naive art.
Term naive refers to something that lacks experience, judgment or wisdom, something natural and unaffected, innocent.
In art, it doesn’t change the meaning. Naive art includes almost all of these. Naive artists have no relevant education, they paint without any awareness of anatomy, technique or perspective, and their paintings are simple, vivid, childlike – innocent.
Naive art is any form of visual art created by individuals who lack or reject conventional education and guidance that professional artists receive. It disagrees with dominant trends in art of their time.
These artists shouldn’t be confused with “Sunday artists”, who paint for fun. Also, it’s wrong to take naive artists for those who don’t know what they’re doing. They create with the same passion as educated and well-trained artists, just without formal knowledge of methods.
Beginnings and Henri Rousseau
It is hard to determine when and where this genre exactly originate. End of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century is the time when this genre started getting more attention and appreciation.
The 20th century was a century of experimentation when traditional ways of expression were left aside and artists were experimenting with new ways of seeing the world and were representing it in an original way.
In that time naive art was discovered. The main figure in naive art was French painter Henri Rousseau, who was discovered by Pablo Picasso.
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), retired toll and tax collector (that’s why he got a nickname Le Douanier – the customs officer), started painting as a middle-aged man and was self-taught.
He had been exhibiting since 1886, but nobody gave value to his work.
The first person who really paid attention to his work was young Pablo Picasso. He was amazed by Rousseau and considered him a true brilliance.
Rousseau’s works are the most frequently reproduced examples of naive art. He was painting portraits, exotic vegetation and jungle scenes, although he had never left France or visited a jungle.
He found his inspiration in children’s books and the botanical gardens of Paris. The magical world of his paintings doesn’t need any explanation (nor is it possible) in order to be understandable, to speak to the audience.
Maybe precisely because of that, its magic becomes so real.
In his works was finally gained a frank virtue of emotion that Gauguin was trying so hard to achieve. Picasso and his friends considered him as the father of 20th-century painting.
Rousseau influenced many avant-garde painters, including Picasso, Jean Hugo, Surrealists and others. They adopted the artist’s sense of freedom and instinctive approach to the composition.
Characteristics of Naive Art
Colorful, childlike simplicity and frankness are words that best describe paintings of naive art.
This genre turns the reality of adulthood into weightless joys of youth. It creates an altered, lighter reality. This is reached in different ways.
Often, there is an inconvenient relationship with the formal standard of painting. For example, artists ignore three rules of perspective which say that the size of objects must decrease proportionally with distance, the colour must be muted with distance and precision of details decrease with distance.
Breaking the rules is essentially what naive artist does, probably unconsciously, producing works that are geometrically inaccurate with crooked perspective and uneven shapes, as a result.
Also, details appear equally rich, no matter if they are in foreground or background. This makes an illusion that figures are floating or positioned in space without anything solid anchoring them in place.
The absence of perspective is one of the most important characteristics of naive art. Paintings convey a sense of frozen motion and deep, calm space, which contributes the feel that objects are floating.
Naive painters use beautiful, vivid, saturate