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There are two possible ways of defining when naive art originated. One is to reckon that it happened when naive art was first accepted as an artistic mode of status equal with every other artistic mode. That would date its birth to the first years of the twentieth century. The other is to apprehend naive art as no more or less than that, and to look back into human prehistory and to a time when all art was of a type that might now be considered naive – tens of thousands of years ago, when the first rock drawings were etched and when the first cave-pictures of bears and other animals were scratched out. If we accept this second definition, we are inevitably confronted with the very intriguing question, so who was that first naive artist?

Many thousands of years ago, then, in the dawn of human awareness, there lived a hunter. One day it came to him to scratch on a flattish rock surface the contours of a deer or a goat in the act of running away. A single, economical line was enough to render the exquisite form of the graceful creature and the agile swiftness of its flight. The hunter’s experience was not that of an artist, simply that of a hunter who had observed his ‘model’ all his life. It is impossible at this distance in time to know why he made his drawing. Perhaps it was an attempt to say something important to his family group; perhaps it was meant as a divine symbol, a charm intended to bring success in the hunt. Whatever – but from the point of view of an art historian, such an artistic form of expression testifies at the very least to the awakening of individual creative energy and the need, after its accumulation through the process of encounters with the lore of nature, to find an outlet for it.

This first-ever artist really did exist. He must have existed. And he must therefore have been truly ‘naive’ in what he depicted because he was living at a time when no system of pictorial representation had been invented. Only thereafter did such a system gradually begin to take shape and develop. And only when such a system is in place can there be anything like a ‘professional’ artist. It is very unlikely, for example, that the paintings on the walls of the Altamira or Lascaux caves were creations of unskilled artists. The precision in depiction of the characteristic features of bison, especially their massive agility, the use of chiaroscuro, the overall beauty of the paintings with their subtleties of coloration – all these surely reveal the brilliant craftsmanship of the professional artist. So what about the ‘naive’ artist, that hunter who did not become professional? He probably carried on with his pictorial experimentation, using whatever materials came to hand; the people around him did not perceive him as an artist, and his efforts were pretty well ignored.

Any set system of pictorial representation – indeed, any systematic art mode – automatically becomes a standard against which to judge those who through inability or recalcitrance do not adhere to it. The nations of Europe have carefully preserved as many masterpieces of classical antiquity as they have been able to, and have scrupulously also consigned to history the names of the classical artists, architects, sculptors and designers. What chance was there, then, for some lesser mortal of the Athens of the fifth century B. C. E. who tried to paint a picture, that he might still be remembered today when most of the ancient frescos have not survived and time has not preserved for us the easel-paintings of those legendary masters whose names have been immortalised through the written word? The name of the Henri Rousseau of classical Athens has been lost forever – but he undoubtedly existed.

The Golden Section, the ‘canon’ of the (ideal proportions of the) human form as used by Polyclitus, the notion of ‘harmony’ based on mathematics to lend perfection to art – all of these derived from one island of ancient civilisation adrift in a veritable sea of ‘savage’ peoples: that of the Greeks. The Greeks encountered this tide of savagery everywhere they went. The stone statues of women executed by the Scythians in the area north of the Black Sea, for example, they regarded as barbarian ‘primitive’ art and its sculptors as ‘naive’ artists oblivious to the laws of harmony.

As early as during the third century B. C. E. the influence of the ‘barbarians’ began to penetrate into Roman art, which at that time was largely derivative of Greek models. The Romans believed not only that they were the only truly civilised nation in the world but that it was their mission to civilize others out of their uncultured ways, to bring their primitive art forms closer to the rigorous standards of the classical art of the Empire. All the same, Roman sculptors felt free to interpret form in a ‘barbaric’ way, for instance by creating a sculpture so simple that it looked primitive and leaving the surface uneven and only lightly polished. The result was ironically that the ‘correct’ classical art lacked that very impressiveness that was characteristic of the years before in the third century B. C. E.

Having overthrown Rome’s domination of most of Europe, the ‘barbarians’ dispensed with the classical system of art. It was as if the ‘canon’ so notably realised by Polyclitus had never existed. Now art learned to frighten people, to induce a state of awe and trepidation by its expressiveness. Capitals in the medieval Romanesque cathedrals swarmed with strange creatures with short legs, tiny bodies and huge heads. Who carved them? Very few of the creators’ names are known. Undoubtedly, however, they were excellent artisans, virtuosi in working with stone. They were also true artists, or their work would not emanate such tremendous power. These artists came from that parallel world that had always existed, the world of what Europeans called ‘primitive’ art.

‘Naive’ art, and the artists who created it, became well known in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Who were these artists, and what was their background? To find out, we have to turn back the clock and look at the history of art at that time.

It is interesting that for much of the intervening century, the naive artists themselves seem to have attracted rather less attention than those people responsible for ‘discovering’ them or publicising them. Yet that is not unusual. After all, the naive artists might never have come into the light of public scrutiny at all if it had not been for the fascination that other young European artists of the avant-garde movement had for their work – avant-garde artists whose own work has now, at the turn of the millennium, also passed into art history. In this way we should not consider viewing works by, say, Henri Rousseau, Niko Pirosmani, Ivan Generalic, André Bauchant or Louis Vivin without reference at the same time to the ideas and styles of such recognised masters as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Mikhail Larionov.

Anonymous, Antelopes and Men.

Kamberg region, Africa.

Aristide Caillaud, The Mad Man, 1942.

81 × 43 cm.

Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris.

But of course, to make that reference itself presents problems. Who was influenced by whom, in what way, and what was the result? The work of the naive artists poses so many questions of this kind that experts will undoubtedly still be trying to unravel the answers for a good time yet. The main necessity is to establish for each of the naive artists precisely who or what the main source of their inspiration was. This has then to be located within a framework expressing the artist’s relationship to the ‘classic’ academic (‘official’) art of the period. Difficult as it is to make headway in such research, matters are further complicated by the fact that such questions may themselves have more than one answer – and that each answer may be subject to different interpretation by different experts anyway.

It gets worse. All the time the works of previously unknown naive artists are coming to light, some of them from the early days of naive art, some of them relatively contemporary. Their art may add to our understanding of the phenomenon of naive art or may change it altogether. For this reason alone it would simply not be feasible to come to an appreciation of naive art that was tightly-defined, complete and static.

In this study, therefore, we will contemplate only those outstanding – yet outstandingly diverse – examples of naive art that really do constitute pointers towards a genuine style, a genuine direction in pictorial representation, albeit one that is currently little known. Think of this book, if you like, as a preliminary sketch for a picture that will be completed by future generations.

It is difficult – perhaps even impossible – to quantify the influence of Henri Rousseau, Niko Pirosmani and Ivan Generalic on professional ‘modern’ artists and the artworks they produce. The reason is obvious: the three of them belonged to no one specific school and, indeed, worked to no specific system of art. It is for this reason that genuine scholars of naive art are somewhat thin on the ground. After all, it is hard to find any basic element, any consistent factor, that unites their art and enables it to be studied as a discrete phenomenon.

The problems begin even in finding a proper name for this kind of art. No single term is descriptive enough. It is all very well consulting dictionaries – they are not much use in this situation. A dictionary definition of a ‘primitive’ in relation to art, for example, might be “An artist or sculptor of the period before the Renaissance”. This definition is actually not unusual in dictionaries today – but it was first written in the nineteenth century and is now badly out of date because the concept of ‘primitive’ art has expanded to include the art of non-European cultures in addition to the art of naive artists worldwide. In incorporating such a massive diversity of elements, the term has thus taken on a broadness that renders it, as a definition, all too indefinite. The description ‘primitive’ is simply no longer precise enough to apply to the works of untaught artists.

The word ‘naive’, which implies naturalness, innocence, unaffectedness, inexperience, trustfulness, artlessness and ingenuousness, has the kind of descriptively emotive ring to it that clearly reflects the spirit of such artists. But as a technical term it is open to confusion. Like Louis Aragon, we could say that “It is naive to consider this painting naive.”[1]

Many other descriptive expressions have been suggested to fill the gap. Wilhelm Uhde called the 1928 exhibition in Paris Les Artists du Sacré-Coeur, apparently intending to emphasise not so much a location as the unspoiled, pure nature of the artists’ dispositions. Another proposal was to call them ‘instinctive artists’ in reference to the intuitive aspects of their method. Yet another was ‘neo-primitives’ as a sort of reference to the idea of nineteenth-century-style ‘primitive’ art while yet distinguishing them from it. A different faction picked up on Gustave Coquiot’s observation in praise of Henri Rousseau’s work and decided they should be known as ‘Sunday artists’.

Anonymous, Masculine Idol, 3000–2000 B. C. E.

Wood, h: 9.3 cm.

Musée d’Archéologie nationale, Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

Séraphine Louis, also called Séraphine de Senlis, The Cherries.

Oil on canvas, 117 × 89 cm.

Museum Charlotte Zander, Bönnigheim.

Séraphine Louis, also called Séraphine de Senlis, Flowers.

Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 54.5 cm.

Museum Charlotte Zander, Bönnigheim.

Henri Rousseau, also called the Douanier Rousseau, War or The Ride of Discord, 1894.

Oil on canvas, 114 × 195 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Of all the various terms on offer, it was naive that won out. This is the word that is used in the titles of books and in the names of a growing number of museums. Presumably, it is the combination of moral and aesthetic factors in the work of naive artists that seems appropriate in the description. Gerd Claussnitzer alternatively believes that the term is meant pejoratively, as a nineteenth-century comment by the realist school on a visibly clumsy and unskilled style of painting.[2] For all that, to an unsophisticated reader or viewer the term ‘naive artist’ does bring to mind an image of the artist as a very human sort of person.

Every student of art feels a natural compulsion to try to classify the naive artists, to categorise them on the basis of some feature or features they have in common. The trouble with this is that the naive artists – as noted above – belong to no specific school of art and work to no specific system of expression. Which is precisely why professional artists are so attracted to their work. Summing up his long life, Maurice de Vlaminck wrote: “I seem initially to have followed Fauvism, and then to have followed in Cézanne’s footsteps. Whatever – I do not mind… as long as first of all I remained Vlaminck.”[3]

Naive artists have been independent of other forms of art from the very beginning. It is their essential quality. Paradoxically, it is their independence that determines their similarity. They tend to use the same sort of themes and subjects; they tend to have much the same sort of outlook on life in general, which translates into much the same sort of painting style. And this similarity primarily stems from the instinctual nature of their creative process. But this apart, almost all naive artists are or have been to some extent associated with one or other non-professional field of art. The most popular field of art for naive artists to date has been folk art.