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The Naive – also called naive art, the art of the naives, primitive
art, the art of the modern primitives and so on – is a distinct
segment of the art of the 20th century. It is comprehends a
discrete group of painters and sculptors untrained in the ways
of art, among the limitless number of kinds of expressions and
trends in modern art. The Naives are always distinguished from
other self-taught, amateur, popular and vernacular artists by
their identifiable artistic style and poetical singularity;
by, then, their sheer artistic excellence. The Naive is a concept
– just like the concepts of Expressionism, Cubism, Abstractionism,
Dadaism and the Surreal and so on – that we use to interrelate
some of the separate worlds of modern artistic creativity.
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The concept of the Naive has been accepted as a necessary
convention for want of a more appropriate definition.
Today a large number of artists and works from very diverse
localities and cultures, heterogeneous topics, stylistic
and morphological, craft and poetic features are brought
together under this name. In spite of its lack of appropriateness,
the name is nevertheless today so widespread and so well
accepted, in all its various forms, that it would be improper
to change it. Apart from that, every other name would
be condemned to failure as well, because it too would
be incapable of summing up the artistic phenomenon concerned
in all its complexity. The Naive, that is, is not a rigidly
defined artistic movement or group of artists or set of
works with corresponding forms, a single style, topic
or poetics; rather, it is composed of an abundance of
the most diverse individual creations and it is for this
reason that no simple definition can comprehend it. In
Croatia it was at first to do with the works of peasants
and working men, of artisans and shopkeepers, clerks and
pensioners, ordinary men and women from the people, hence
the name popular art, but the most successful creative
figures became, over the course of time, professional
artists, which is without doubt a very individual trait
of the Croatian Naive. |
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Primitiveness and naivety are not coexistent with
the Naive as artistic phenomenon. The maladroitness
of some of the artists of the 18th and 19th centuries,
the various works of anonymous painters of the post-Baroque
"hinterglasmalerei" in Croatia, the votive
pictures, the dilettante and provincial forms (most
often in Biedermeier pictures) can without doubt be
called naive, in the full and true sense of the word,
but they do not belong to the Naive in the sense in
which it is a distinct segment of artistic creativity,
because there is in all this no personal stylistic coherence
or any level of art. |
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In Croatia the concept of the Naive assumes the work of
artists who arrived from amateurism, people who are more
or less self-taught, painters and sculptors who did not
obtain their education by systematic training at art schools
and academies, which did not, however, prevent them from
creating their own style, achieving their own level of
art. An identifiably individual style and an individual
poetics that is always there pick the Naive out quite
clearly from the various examples of amateurism and dilettantism,
from "Sunday" and "vernacular" painters
and sculptors, and from all the rest of the undifferentiated
mass of the self-taught. Since the artists of the Naive
do not know how to construct a work according to the lessons
of the academies, there are always certain departures
in their works in proportions and perspective, and numerous
"illogicalities in form and space. A positive evaluation
of such characteristics, as the expression of the free
creative imagination, could come into being only after
Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and the other
movements and phenomena of the Modern Movement had already
been experienced. This clearly shows that the Naive is
also a 20th century form of expression and is in key with
the modern sensibility. |
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The Naive is the consequence and proof of democratisation
in both the general relations in society and in artistic
creation. It clearly shows that everyone has the right
to express himself or herself in art and that schools
of art are in themselves no guarantee of artistic value,
because art can be created even without them. In the
Naive, emotion counts more than reason and intellectual
speculations. In the majority of cases, the Naive expresses
the joy of life and the victory of hope. Here we can
discover "the forgotten nature" and "lost
childhood", stories and dreams, a vital imagination
and simple human inventions, the forgotten "wonder
at the world" and the ability to rejoice in motif.
But the Naive is not just an Arcadian art and idyll,
it does not express only trust in and celebration of
life; there are some sorry tales in it too, some dark
and chthonic accords; in the Naive we can also come
across the tragic and the symbolic, the fantastic and
the irreal, surreal relationships, somnambulism and
unreality, which all means that it is made up of a hundred
opposites, just like Life.
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