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In 1952, the Peasant Art Gallery
was founded in Zagreb; from 1956 it operated
under the name of the Gallery of Primitive
Art, while since 1994, in line with a decision
by the Croatian Parliament, its title has
been the Croatian Museum of Naive Art. From
the very beginning the establishment was
organized and run according to strict museological
principles, and is thus deemed to be the
world’s first museum of naive art.
The Croatian Museum of Naive Art holds more
than 1,600 works of art – paintings, sculptures,
drawings and prints – mainly by Croatian
artists.
The permanent display of the Museum was
established according to the maxim: Naive
Art as a Segment of Modern Art.
Some eighty anthology-piece paintings and
sculptures of a score of classics of the
Croatian Naive are on display, from the
early thirties to the 1980s. The focus is
on Croatian artists – of the celebrated
Hlebine School, and a few of the more highly-valued
independent artists. In conjunction with
their works, artworks of significant artists
of other nations are also on show. |
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In the first room are the pictures
of Ivan Generalić (1914-1992)
the first master of the Hlebine School, and the
first among the naive painters of Croatia to create
a personal style and art of a high level. The
display starts with the early works, created at
the beginning of the 1930s when the social question
was stressed (The Requisition, 1934), goes on
through works of poetic realism, with a powerful
Romantic charge (Cows in the Forest, 1938; Harvesters
1939), to the surreal phantasmagorias of the 1950s
and 1960s (The Death of Virius, 1959). Then come
the refined approaches of the seventies, where
powerful condensation can be seen, acts of summation
and empty, abstract backgrounds (Self-Portrait,
1975). In the pictures of Franjo Mraz
(1910-1981), who started painting and exhibiting
contemporaneously with Generalić, and in the works
of Mirko Virius (1889-1943),
who appeared a few years later (Return in the
Rain, 1939; Harvest, 1938), we can see many diverse
scenes of rural life. The stone sculptures of
Lavoslav Torti (1875-1942), alongside
those in wood of Petar Smajić
(1910-1985), are the first examples of Croatian
naive sculpture.
Room 2 shows works of Hlebine School masters of
the second generation, Ivan Večenaj (1920)
and Mijo Kovačić (1935). In Večenaj
there are burlesque and grotesque figures (Goiterous
Jana, 1962) as well as works inspired by Biblical
topics, with a strong and unrestrained handling
of colour (The Evangelists on Calvary, 1966).
In Kovačić we can see flooded land and expanses
covered in snow-drifts (Swineherd, 1967; Singeing
a Pig, 1962), as well as religious images and
scenes of catastrophe. |
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After this come the veristic
and psychological portraits of Dragan
Gaži (1930-1983), distinguished representative
of the Hlebine School, whose works are characterized
by a tonal manner of construction (Old Man Krančec,
1956; Portrait of Mate Bujina, 1959), and also
the portraits of Martin Mehkek
(1936), with his characteristic type-presentations
(My Neighbour, 1962). In the third room also
are the paintings of Ivan Lacković Croata
(1931-2004), author of twilight scenes (Autumn,
1964) and distinctive, melancholic elongated
landscapes (Long Winter, 1966). Lacković is
one of the most brilliant and remarkable draughtsmen
in the world Naive.
The fourth room has pictures of Ivan
Rabuzin (1921) who by the end of the
fifties and the early sixties was creating works
in an idiosyncratic and clearly-established
style of enormous lyricism (On the Hills – Primeval
Forest, 1960; Dawn, 1963); with systematic abstraction,
simplification and stylisation he arrived at
a-real creations (Three Flowers, 1967).
The pictures of Emerik Feješ
(1904-1969) are examples of the urban Naive,
with themes of exclusively city scenes and architecture
(St Mark’s, Venice, 1956). His works are characterized
by a markedly geometrical composition and vivid,
expressive handling of colour (Milan Cathedral,
1966). Also in this room are the sculptures
of Petar Smajić, master of
clean simple forms in wood (Adam and Eve, 1934;
Mother and Child, 1934).
Room 5 holds the works of Matija Skurjeni
(1898-1990), the most distinguished,
alongside Rabuzin and Feješ, of the independent
artists. His pictures are characterized by fantasy
motifs and a mood of the unreal. Alongside lyrical
landscapes (My Homeland, 1960), there are also
dreamlike works, with powerful distortions and
alogicalities in perspectives and proportions
(Roaming Athletes, 1960; Soccer Players, 1961).
Then come the burlesque and phantasmagoric works
of Josip Generalić (1936),
the painting of whom departs from the standard
Hlebine iconography with draughts on themes
from contemporary life (Guiana, 1978) and the
paintings of Drago Jurak (1911-1994),
the creator of a fantastic architecture in his
“phantasmopolises”. The works of Slavko
Stolnik (1929-1991) have a very expressive
colour, and although the artist is not by origins
part of the Hlebine School, he did adopt its
style and poetics. Eugen Buktenica
(1914-1997), the first Dalmatian naive painter,
shows mainly life on the sea.
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| Slavko
Stolnik:
Cows Coming Home, 1957 |
Buktenica:
Fishing Convoy, 1955 |
Drago Jurak:
Luxury Boat, 1974 |
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From the collection of foreign
artists, only a few of the most outstanding painters
and sculptors are represented in the permanent
collection, mainly for reasons of space. Germain
van der Steen (1897-1985) is a French
painter who started working before the beginning
of World War II, his works featuring a forceful
handling of colour. He particularly dealt with
cityscapes (Notre-Dame, 1963) and animals (Moon
Faced Cat , 1962).
He is followed by the works of Simon Schwartzenberg
(1895-1990), another French artist, who was recognized
in the early sixties as one of the most striking
masters of the world Naive of the second half
of the 20th century. His pictures are characterized
by fancy, an alogical perspective and a very decorous
and lyrical handling of colour (The Three Graces,
about 1965).
Nikifor (around 1895-1968) is
the most celebrated Polish naive artist, endorsed
in his homeland as early as the late 1940s, achieving
a European reputation in the second half of the
century, after the great world exhibition of the
Naive in Knokke-le-Zoute in Belgium in 1958. He
mainly used his transparent watercolours to depict
architectural scenes with letters of the alphabet
worked into them, primarily as a rhythmical structure,
for he was only barely literate (Motif from Krynica,
about 1960).
Italian naive artists are represented by Enrico
Benassi (1902-1978), whose works are
characterized by marked stylisations, powerful
rhythm and gentle colours, and Pietro
Ghizzardi (1906-1986), a highly expressive
master, a painter who also used powerful stylisation
and rhythmicization.
The sculptures of Sofija Naletilić Penavuša
(1913-1994), a Croat woman artist from Bosnia
and Herzegovina, achieved recognition in the late
1980s and early 1990s, because of their clean,
reduced forms and powerful polychromy, one of
the most striking phenomena in the European contemporary
Naive (Large Owl, 1985).
To close, we can mention the Dutchman Willem
van Genk (1927), who in the last two
decades has confirmed himself as one of the key
personalities at the borderline between the Naive
and Art Brut – with his dark and dismal scenes
from the life of the big city, full of existential
angsts (Leipzig, 1950). Quite the opposite of
him can be found in Pavel Leonov
(1920), the most celebrated Russian autodidact,
a painter of modern compositional treatments,
with a number of simultaneous and yet separately
framed events, numerous narrative scenes that
frequently have an allegorical meaning (Russian
Travellers in Africa, 1996).
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Simon Schwartzenberg:
Eiffel Tower, 1960-65
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Petar Smajić:
Mother and Child, 1934
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Sofija Naletilić
Penavuša:
Large Owl, 1985
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