A very prosaic problem attends any discussion of naive art in Canada: the study of such art is still in its infancy. We have been long enough in recognising the contribution of folk art to our culture; naive art, a much less common contribution, has yet to receive the attention that it deserves. The artists are practically unknown and this makes it very difficult to comment with any assurance on what has influenced individual artrsts or even how large a body of work they have produced. Not only the artists but also the sympathetic observers are scattered and isolated.

Canadian artists are struggling to grasp a culture which is neither quite folk nor purely North American in origin. Our European roots are recent and confused. The disparate immigrant groups that make up what is smugly referred to as the "Canadian mosaic" are both geographically and politically isolated. Memory is their only link to the roots of their culture, and it fades and is altered by lack of contact. American mass culture intrudes and renders much of what was once a genuine expression of folk culture as tourist kitsch. Unlike our American neighbours, we have no common thread of myth to bind our national consciousness, none of the simple verities of Grandma Moses. The house and barn paintings from Galt Ontario are not joyous or feverishly populated but isolated and stark; they speak to no one else and barely speak to each other across the ambiguous ground on which they stand.

























drawing of a steamship, as a piece of ebullient capitalistic optimism, contrasts beautifully with Richard Coates' serene "Quaker Madonna," who cradles two infants and supports the banner of "Peace." These two works may perfectly express the poles of the North American promise: material gain, and freedom from religious persecution. One of the realities confronting l9th-century immigrants to Canada was the overwhelming vastness of the land itself. The theme of isolation and man dwarfed by nature recurs repeatedly in Canadian popular painting. The carving of the schooner "Porto Weir" floats breathlessly on a grey-green ocean as an agonisingly lonesome symbol of men who work on this life-sustaining but unforgiving sea. "Porto Weir," inscribed in the paint of the background, so minimally as almost to defy reproduction, hovers like an epitaph over this ghost ship.

Despite their dimly recognised contribution, contemporary Canadian naive artists represent a vital continuity with the work of their historical predecessors. The modern work is not an aberration but an affirmation that the spirit of an art that extends itself into a larger world is still alive. In looking at the contemporary work, it is important to avoid the easy solution of choosing paintings of charm and simplicity and offering them up to the world under the generous umbrella of the term "naive." Charm and simplicity are not substitutes for a clarity and force of vision which carries itself effortlessly across cultures and time. Any other use of "naive" in an art context calls up the worst sin that can be charged against that word: it is patronising. The selection of 20th-century works is advisedly limited. We do not yet know the extent of the contribution that naive art has made to Canada. Appreciation and its search for gratification are only beginning.

The five contemporary artists are chosen because they represent the best range of influences: folk, work, mass culture, and a sense of space. Ernest Gendron, from Quebec, has combined folk symbolism - stars, hearts, birds and floral motifs - with an obsessive and vibrant patterning to frame his nostalgic and cynical relief paintings of media heroes. The price of an individual painting is based on Gendron's appreciation of the international fame of the subject: up to $ 300,000 for a portrait of Charlie Chaplin. Sam Spencer also draws from popular culture images, but with a completely different intent. Spencer has carved an icon, a homage to a hockey hero whose image has come to him from the pages of a sports calendar. It shares with the anonymous painting of the fox from Prince Edward Island a powerful sense of the survivor: one a latter-day knight errant conquering with grace and strength, the other keeping the world at bay with guile and a mythic aura. "These Good Old Threshing Days," by Jan Wyers, is a celebration of the time when the vast loneliness of the prairies is reduced to a human scale with the communal effort of harvesting. It is a joyous affirmation of man's labour. Joseph Sleep's joy is that of a man discovering the whole world at once. All living things are his delight. He absorbed the whimsy and colours of the carnivals he worked for and combined them with elements of children's book illustrations and patterns given him by a hospital nurse to create an ingenuous peaceful kingdom.

Thomas Lackey
NAIVE ART IN CANADA

Because of the cultural confusion of a country that has retained ethnic identities instead of submerging them in an American "melting pot," the general tradition of decorative folk painting remains strong. The 1745 Ex Voto from Quebec is evidence of both the religious foundation of that province's settlement and the continuity of a folk painting tradition in the New World. It is irrelevant that this work is almost indistinguishable from its European contemporaries; it is part of the root of a tree that continues to flower in this country. Successive waves of immigrants have brought a fresh eye and a renewed desire to describe and depict their new environment. Their images vary widely from frenzied to awestruck or nostalgic.

NAÏEVE ART IN THE NETHERLANDS BY NICO VAN DER ENDT (AMSTERDAM)

It would not be an exaggeration to say that naive art has always existed but that its evaluation is a relatively modern phenomenon. The beginnings of such evaluation in the Netherlands are linked up with the oldest preserved naive painting. As far as I know, the painting dates from 1752 and it may therefore be assumed that a turning point oecurred somewhere in the middle of the l8th century in evaluating the works of formerly unrecognised artists. Economic considerations certainly had a hand in this. The middle class, growing in strength, demonstrated a desire for decoration. Not in a position to pay wellknown artists, they frequently had recourse to house painters or local and itinerant craftsmen.
It was probably a house painter who produced the large, early naive paintings exhibited in the period furniture room of the Fries Scheepvaart Museum in Sneek. Also, it was the custom in Holland around 1800 to cover the walls not with wallpaper from floor to ceiling but with painted canvases. There were special workshops (for instance in Hoorn) engaged in this activity. It is possible, but not certain, that these works were personal in character. Some craftsman or house painter, finding himself with more free time than before, especially after retirement, may have become a naive artist, reviving his past and at the same time revealing his talent. This is a contemporary sociological phenomenon.
it is difficult to determine just what change in mentality gave impetus to early naive art. One thing is certain - that in the l8th century a development occurred that led to what was known as Romanticism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, champion of the return to nature, inspired many romantics. The naive artist is a prime example of acceptance of the militant motto of the romantics: "Back to nature!" As an amateur, the naive artist is always natural and direct. From Romanticism on - with the abolition of guilds after the French Revolution - dilettantism and amateurism acquired a role in culture present to this very day. In the l9th century, naive art slowly took on a personal character. Not all preserved works were produced on commission. It is true of Holland, too, that only after modern art had proved the value of freedom of expression did people begin to respect in naive talents the specific features setting their art apart from academic works.
Just as in France the appearance of Henri Rousseau marks the end of early naive achievements, so can the same boundary line be drawn in Holland from the first pictures by Sal Meijer at the beginning of this century. His well-known "Cat in a Hatbox," which he painted in several versions, dates from 1909. With the exception of his works, not many naive paintings have been preserved from the first half of this century. Probably much work was done, because in 1941 an art critic wrote on the occasion of a naive art exhibition in the Town Museum of Amsterdam: "Attempts by talented men of the people are more in fashion than ever." Painters worthy of note from that period are the pastry-maker Sipke Houtman (1871-1945), who began to produce after retirement, and Willem C. Ruysbroek (1911- 1961). Sipke Houtman's works are in the Town Museum in Amsterdam while Ruysbroek has an extremely interesting canvas in the International Museum of Naive Art of Anatol Jakovsky, from which it may be concluded that he was one of the most outstanding naive painters of Holland.
It was only in the sixties that more attention began to be paid to naive art. A large number of naive painters were discovered, thanks in substantial part to Dr Louis Gans, the art historian. In 1966, Dr Gans became the Chairman of the Albert Dorne Foundation, whose task it was to give impetus to amateur art and set up a collection of international naive art, known as the Albert Dorne Collection. The sponsor of this foundation was the "Famous Artists School," a commercial institution offering instruction and selling written lessons in drawing. The Albert Dorne Collection contains a hundred or so pictures by naive painters from all Europe, including some thirty works by Netherlands artists. In 1973, the Collection was taken over by the Clemens-Sels Museum in Neuss (Federal Republic of Germany). The generation of naive artists discovered by Dr Louis Gans (including Pieter Hagoort, Leo Neervoort, Jentje van der Sloot), is almost gone today, but those men were exceptional, serving as examples for a definition of naive art, which was often mistakenly associated with technical imperfection. Their place is being taken by a younger generation of painters, better informed and searching for new roads in naive painting: Ilona Schmit, Joop Plasmeijer, Gorki Bollar. Now that naive art has rid itself of modishness, young talents can develop more freely. Clearly, however, the younger painters wish to transmit their spiritual development to their paintings, even if it means departing from naive art.
Naive art has always existed and will always exist, of that there is no doubt. It is characteristic, however, that in the new generation of the retired, there are almost no new talents. Is modern passivity in utilisation of free time, spent in looking at television, a danger to naive art?
Nico v.d. Endt Amsterdam

Most of these works are naive only in the sense that they cannot reconcile their new circumstances. But through the confusion and the mass of folk expression that is solely concerned with transmitting the symbols of a culture in the throes of accommodating itself to a new world, come some works of vision and expression of what this new land might offer. Young Sarah Picket's

L'art naïf ( David Naze )

existe depuis toujours. Mais avant l'apparition de Henri Rousseau, dit le Douanier, à la fin du XIXème siècle, cet art n'avait pas de nom et était ignoré. Depuis, les historiens d'art y ont accordé une attention grandissante. Le fait que cet art réponde à un besoin de l'être contemporain, quel qu'il soit, homme ou femme, paysan, artisan ou bourgeois, en résumant les valeurs qu'il a déjà oubliées ou qu'il est en train d'oublier, présente en effet un grand intérêt.

Mais comment distinguer l'art naïf de l'art officiellement admis, de l'art accadémique ? Alors que les peintres accadémiques adoptent l'une ou plusieurs des formes et des techniques existantes que d'autres ont imposées, seuls les peintres naïfs partent tous d'une même base: une expérience instinctive, franche et spontanée du monde qui les entoure. S'ils s'écartent de cela et qu'ils adoptent des formes et le langage accadémiques, les peintres naïfs cessent d'être naïfs. L'ignorance ou la négation des règles de la logique et de l'art accadémique, la liberté, la spontanéité et l'humanisme sont les qualités essentielles des naïfs.

Ignorant toute notion d'intellectualité, ils ne sont préoccupés ni par les problèmes de la lumière, ni par l'étude des volumes, ni par aucun procédé. La souveraine bonne conscience de la peinture naïve la rend étrangère à tous les cataclysmes artistiques, sociaux, spirituels déchaînés ces dernières années.

Les peintres naïfs peuvent être regroupés en deux tendances bien spécifiques: les super-réalistes, qui possèdent une technique similaire à celle des hyper-réalistes - c'est à dire qu'ils copient farouchement la réalité - et les Visionnaires, plus proches des surréalistes - c'est à dire qu'ils créent un dessin relevant du surnaturel et du fantastique. L'inspiration des peintres naïfs est souvent inattendue, passant de sujets totalement anecdotiques à des scènes bibliques, historiques, comme mûs par un impérieux besoin de donner des assises, des racines à leur existence. Ils ont le goût des légendes, des jungles, des fauves et trouvent en eux, dans un voyage immobile, cette notion de liberté vitale aujourd'hui.

Il existe dans la peinture naïve des similitudes avec les dessins que peuvent réaliser quotidiennement certaines personnes. Ainsi, comparer les oeuvres d'enfants et d'artistes naïfs laissent souvent entrevoir des affinités profondes. Toutefois, dans l'évolution s'amorce une divergence croissante qui aboutit finalement à une rupture totale. Les dessins et les peintures d'enfants sont les produits d'une phase transitoire; les impulsions diminuent avec le développement de l'enfant et l'acte de création cède généralement la place à une conception rationnelle délibérée. L'oeuvre de l'artiste à, quant à elle, le pouvoir de survivre. On a aussi rapproché les oeuvres des peintres naïfs et celles des fous. On a mélangé allègrement écritures et styles, même si elles ont en commun symbolisme et magie. En fait, de nombreux artistes naïfs de premier plan flottent dans les limbes, entre illusion et réalité. Ils comptent au nombre des derniers individus qui possèdent encore la liberté de s'émerveiller et de donner forme à cet émerveillement.

En définitive, chaque jour qui passe, l'art naïf acquiert une vitalité nouvelle, dûe à sa variété autant qu'à sa richesse. Cette peinture, toute de spontanéité, nous fait ressentir une émotion, une chaleur qui nous permet de rêver à un monde meilleur. Elle ne cesse de nous apporter, dans un univers perturbé, tout à la fois fraîcheur, bien-être et air de fête.
(David Naze is the son of the famous French naif painter Michel Naze)

Every study of modern art in Israel will mention the role played indirectly in it, by the work of Henri Rousseau. Eager to find a new artistic language through which their unique experience could be expressed, young artists from the Bezalel School in Jerusalem (founded in 1906) rebelled against their academic teachers and went to Paris in the 1920s. Rousseau's "innocence" matched their need to return to basics, because they felt they "began anew," exiles returning to their ancient land, rediscovering its landscape and remodelling its culture. These artists, among them Reuven Rubin, assimilated Rousseau's influence and when they returned to Jerusalem created what has since been recognised as the beginning of modern painting in Israel - "The Eretz-Israel School."

Even before the creation of the State of Israel popular or naive artists must have lived in the Holy Land, whether Jewish, Christian or Moslem, but there is very little record of their existence. In an exhibition called "Arts and Crafts in l9th-Century Eretz-Israel," held at the Israel Museum in 1979, three Jewish folk artists were represented: Moshe Mizrahi, Shlomo Janiwer,originally from Jerusalem, and Joseph Zvi Geiger of Safed. It is now commonly accepted that Shalom of Safed, the best known contemporary Israeli naive, has in his own way, continued their tradition.



















Israeli museums, especially the Haifa Museum, have collected and shown works by local naive painters through the years, but the first attempt at presenting an overall picture of naive art was made in 1966 by the Israel Museum. Since there is no catalogue of that show, it is hard to discover how many artists were represented in it. The Tel Aviv Museum followed in 1970, this time with a catalogue listing eighteen participants. Occasionally, but not often, curators include works by naive painters in theme-exhibitions: "From Landscape to Abstraction, from Abstraction to Nature," at the Israel Museum, 1972, included Shalom of Safed and Moshe Elnatan. "Artist and Society," at the Tel Aviv Museum, 1979, included Elnatan and Gabriel Cohen.

Naive artists do not enjoy great popularity in Israel, and find it much easier to sell their works abroad than at home. They have made their mark at international exhibitions, such as those in Munich and Zurich in 1974. Anatole Jakovsky included five Israeli naive artists in his Lexicon, while West German television made a documentary about them in the series "Naives of the World."

The following are included in this encyclopaedia as the most important. Shalom of Safed (died 1980), Natan Heber (died 1975), Gabriel Cohen (born 1940), Shimshon Lemberger (born 1910) and Menahem Messinger (born 1900). There are women among naive painters in Israel, but none of them has yet produced an important oeuvre.

The above-mentioned artists only rarely knew of each other. Raised in traditional Jewish families, they still reflect different cultural sources through their work: Shalom of Safed was a typical Jewish-Palestinian artist, continuing a tradition known from the l9th century, but probably as old as the Jewish post-biblical settlement of the Holy Land. Moshe Elnatan and Gabriel Cohen are Jews from the East, who imbibed the Moslem culture which surrounded their ancestors in Iraq, Persia and Turkey. Natan Heber, Shimshon Lemberger and Menahem Messinger came from Poland and their work stems from the culture of the East-European stetl.n

Ruth Debel
NAIVE ART IN ISRAEL

  Angelo Valcarenghi , Galleria d'Arte "Il Crociccio" Genova - Italian

ARTE NAIF

"La pittura Naif trae origine , per quanto attiene al proprio nome , da un vocabolo della lingua inglese (NAIF o NAIVE) che indica ingenuita' , semplicita'.  Naif e' dunque l'opera di pittori che esprimendo situazioni , emozioni , riferendosi a luoghi geografici e ad immagini tra le piu' disparate non necessariamente univoche , omogenee tra loro ed esprimendosi con caratteri grafici e cromatici e tecniche differenziate , non omologate in un "modo canonico" , hanno come carattere fondamentale comune l'assenza di tecnicismi di derivazione scolastica , un linguaggio elementare , spesso infantile (mancanza di di proporzioni , di prospettiva ecc..) , tendenzialmente scorretto dal punto di vista delle regole "grammaticali" , carenze superate e riscattate pero' da una forte e distintiva capacita' espressiva.

Col trascorrere del tempo e nelle cognizioni del grande pubblico il termine Naif , rispetto alla sua accezzione originaria ha assunto impropriamente un significato riduttivo , cirscoscritto di "CORRENTE PITTORICA" di natura ( ma meglio sarebbe dire di carattere stilistico , scelto consapevolmente) primitivistica , che esprime con semplicita' rappresentativa , con ingenuita' , in senso principalmente ottimistico e fiabesco , a modo di narrazione , scene di vita quotidiana ( privilegiando paesaggi innevati o , comunque , paesaggi naturalistici nei quali si muovono ed agiscono una o piu' figure umane ) risolte con un disegno semplificato elementarmente e con un ricco accostamento di colori vivaci e di immagini scandite "