Charles Lewis Art - California

What’s In a Name – Is It Naïve or Something Else?

Last year I showed some prints of my paintings to my friend Peter Silverman, the noted Parisian renaissance art broker (who, incidentally, discovered the ‘Principessa’ attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci that was much in the news, and which I riffed on in the picture “The Princess in Black and Gold”  http://www.charleslewisart.com/surreal-visions-paintings/detail/the-roar-of-the-universe/). His first impression was that I fell into the ‘naïve’ camp. This is a frequent European view. On other occasions, I seem to be lumped into the genre of ‘outsider’ art. In the art world, the words people use to categorize art are important, and can easily lead to misunderstanding.  Here, I’m going to take on the meaning of Naïve in art. Perhaps later, I’ll look at the meaning of “outsider.”

So, what is Naïve Art?

From the Encyclopedia Britannica:(http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/401931/naive-art)

Naïve art, also spelled naïf art, is the work of artists in sophisticated societies who lack or reject conventional expertise in the representation of real objects. Naïve artists are not to be confused with hobbyists  or “Sunday painters” who paint for fun. The naïve creates with the same passion as the trained artist but without the latter’s formal knowledge of methods.

Naïve works are often extremely detailed, and there is a tendency toward the use of brilliant, saturated colours rather than more subtle mixtures and tones. There is also a characteristic absence of perspective, which creates the illusion that figures are anchored in the space, with the result that figures in naïve paintings are often “floating.”

The most frequently reproduced examples of naïve art are the works of the French artist Henri Rousseau. Rousseau’s paintings, like many others of this genre, convey a sense of frozen motion and deep, still space, and the figures are always shown either full face or in fairly strict profile (the naïve painter rarely conceals much of a face and almost never portrays a figure completely from the back). Like many naïve painters and sculptors, Rousseau projects his intensity and passion through his figures—especially the staring eyes—and the precision of his line and colour.

Comment: In the Britannica, I sense a whiff of condescension, a down-the-nose look at what to them seems like amateurism. The emphasis on a lack of perspective is telling- while many so-called naïve paintings have odd or distorted perspectives, the over-broad Naïve genre is not by any means perspective-absent, with floating creatures and such. It’s as if all naive art was related to Chagall (surely a naïve painter, if there ever was one).

In an essay by Dan Chill, for his Gallery of International Naïve Art (GINA) (http://www.ginagallery.com/asp/WhatIsNaiveArt.asp), he notes:

For many, the term “naïve art” conjures up the verdant valleys and happy hamlets of Grandma Moses, the luxuriant vegetation and exotic jungles of Henri Rousseau, and the palmy South Sea Isles and pristine Tahitian women of Paul Gauguin.

Naïve art is characterized by a refreshing innocence and the charming use of bright colors, child-like perspective and idiosyncratic scale. It portrays simple, easily-understandable and often idealized scenes of everyday life. The naïve artist - often self-taught - treats us to a uniquely literal, yet extremely personal and coherent, vision of what the world was, is or should be. From cave paintings to the present day, naïve art has traversed the millennia.

In Western Europe, naïve art came to prominence in the late nineteenth century, when Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) began exhibiting his works side-by-side to those of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Bonnard and Matisse at the Parisian exhibitions of the Salon des Independants. In 1891, when Rousseau was producing his first jungle painting, Paul Gauguin, who had departed the urban bustle of Paris for the simple life of the South Seas, was painting “Women of Tahiti.”

Comment: Again, we see an overly restricted view of the naïve, bound by “childlike perspective” and “bright colors.” The pictures shown on GINA’s website support his view – the Grandma Moses style predominates. I personally equate this much more with the folk painting tradition than with my own view of the naïve. I like it that he equates Gauguin with a naïve tradition – since Gauguin is so firmly lodged within the fine art world, it elevates the view of naïve a little.

I found the following description on the website of the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art: (http://www.hmnu.org/en/default.asp)

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. Naïve comprehends a discrete group of painters and sculptors untrained in the ways of art…. The Naives are distinguished from other self-taught, amateur, popular and vernacular artists by their identifiable artistic style and poetical singularity; by, then, their sheer artistic excellence.

Naive 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.

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.

Comment: In Croatia, naïve art is celebrated, with many exceptional painters, past and present, working in this vein. This description represents a much more sophisticated, supportive view of the naïve tradition, based more on the primacy of the imagination than on common stylistic elements. Indeed, as each of the art movements referenced has emerged, their newness has always provoked negative comments about their quality.  Naïve simply spans a longer period of time, and lacks the “school” framework that characterizes the others. It is, truly, “a …. form of expression” above all else.

In the website of the International Naïve Art Museum of Vicq, near Paris, Anatole Jakovsky has written an essay entitled: What is a Naïve Painter?  (http://www.daprix.com/barton/artist/naive.html#Anchor%20What%20is?)   Below are a few excerpts.

“The following facts may serve as a useful start towards a definition of naïve painting:

1) A naïve painter is untutored and has invented his own expressive and stylistic alphabet entirely unaided. This fundamental difference separates the naïve painters from all the representatives of folk art….

2) Every truly naïve painter has his own vision of the world which, in some mysterious way, is uniquely different from that of any other. This is why naïve art is not something that can be taught. For the same reason, there can never be a School of Naïve Painting.The individual vision of every naïve painter arises from a condition of the soul, which is particularly unique and commanding. This vision merges with a necessity to express itself, a necessity much stronger than the artist himself. The naïve painter is akin to a person possessed. He is in the grip of a 'thing', the nature of which he cannot logically understand.

3) What is of cardinal importance is that the naïve painter should be blessed with the gift of talent, and not paint merely for the fun of it or to pass the time, as a kind of weekend hobby. Thus naïve painting, in comparison with mainstream painting, is not to be seen in terms of its 'importance' but in terms of its visionary quality.

4) Not everyone who wants to be can be a naïve painter, a truism worth repeating yet again.

(Naïve painting) demonstrates an arrangement as orderly and coherent as that of any other kind of painting. Its rhythms are consistent, its colors harmonize - only differently, that is all. The archaic, old-fashioned look of naïve painting doubtless goes back to the archetypes discovered by the famous Zurich psychoanalyst Carl Jung; one might say that naïve painters have certain pictorial ideas circulating in their subconscious which, quite spontaneously, demand to be given release. Thus naïve painting is neither of yesterday nor of today, but timeless. Perhaps of tomorrow, who knows.

Comment: Mr. Jakovsky presents a number of important points. First, naive is not folk art. Then, he praises the “individual vision of every naïve painter.” Perhaps most important, he stresses the need for a naïve work to be “as orderly and coherent as that of any other kind of painting,” with the same criteria for excellence, and he invokes the same requirement for painting talent (meaning producing really good paintings) that is needed in any other form of painting. I particularly like his reference to Carl Jung, and the connection to the subconscious – while not specific to the naïve, it is perhaps more frequently present there than in other types of painting.

Finally, at the risk of beating the topic to death, there is this entry from a blog entitled “Meyer Schapiro and Naive Art” (https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/schapiro/2009/10/20/meyer-schapiro-and-naive-art/)

“The term "naive" art has etymological roots with "outsider" and "self-taught" art, and, indeed, these terms have been conflated with each other. While each term has its set of socio-cultural issues, naive, outsider, and self-taught art have deep roots in the art historical canon, even while the genre itself spirals in and out of the canonical orbit constructed from an Anglo-European art historical framework.

In retrospect, and as the etymology of the terms "naive," "primitive," "self-taught," and "outsider" art have demonstrated, these genres have a lineage that was part of the "modernist" canon itself in that, as definitions, they were constructed to clarify each other as descriptive terms to understand the practices of artists during a given historical time.”

Comment: Meyer’s attempt to separate the naïve, outsider and self-taught vocabulary is good, but I’m not sure he really understands the difference. But it is important to include these terms within the general world of art movements, if for no other reason than to prevent the diminishment of their importance by omission.

Okay, now that we’ve seen what some learned commentators say about Naïve Art, I pose the question (to myself): Is my work Naïve Art?

            I would have to say no. Some individual pictures may veer in that direction, especially in the Toy Paintings, but the similarity is more one of content (toys, teddy bears, dolls) than style. Most portraits are not full-face frontal poses, and the pictures usually contain various perspective elements – the tile foregrounds are designed to achieve a coherent perspective placement of the central figures, and many of the backgrounds support this perspective. The placement of shadows is likewise not anti-perspective. The colors are typically not extremely primary, although I do like boldness in color, nor is their shading simplistic.

            The subject matter of the “Visions” paintings is perhaps more Naïve, in that the pictures often try to depict things that are not normally associated with culture or ‘reality.” But these are not ‘folky’ or village scenes by any stretch of the imagination. I think my main connection to the Naïve tradition is in my  embrace of a high degree of imaginary content and a creative approach to finding solutions to ‘how-do-I-paint-this?’ dilemmas that every picture has.  I’m too many years into my own stylistic world to adopt a more conventional approach. (A dealer I fell into conversation with recently told me I should “go back to school and learn how to paint” if I wanted to “make it in the art world.” He may be right, but I’m not going to art school. Too late for that.