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I. Birth of Naive Art
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When Was Naive Art Born?
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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 a.s 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.

Anonymous,
Antelopes and Men, Kamberg region, Africa.
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.

Aristide Caillaud, The Mad Man, 1942
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Anonymous,
Masculine Idol, 3000-2000 B.CE.
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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.

Anonymous,
Saint Georges Straking
Down the Dragon
'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, Andre 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 Miro, Max Ernst and
Mikhail Larionov.
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.

Seraphine Louis,
The Cherries Flowers
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Seraphine Louis,
The Cherries Flowers
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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 dements, the
term has thus taken on a broadness that renders it, as a definition, all indefinite. The description 'primitive' is simply no longer precise
enough to apply to the works of untaught artists.

Henri Rousseau,
War,
1894

Henri Rousseau,
The
Sleeping Gipsy, 1897
The word 'naive', which implies naturalness, innocence, unaffected ness,
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."
Many other descriptive expressions have been suggested to fill the gap.
Wilhelm Uhde called the 1928 exhibition in Paris Les Artists du Sacre-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. Vet 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'.
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."
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 lite,
Maurice de Vlaminck wrote: "I seem initially to have followed Fauvism,
and then to have followed in Cezanne's footsteps. Whatever - I do not
mind. . . as long as first of all I remained Vlaminck."
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.

Paul Gauguin,
Where Do We
Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
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Modern Art in Quest of
New Material
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The rebellion of
Romanticism against classicism, and the resultant general enthusiasm for
artworks that broke the classical mould, set the scene for the events
that took place on the threshold between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Classical painting styles became obsolete: even its die-hard
champions realised that classicism was in crisis. Historical and genre
painting as featured in the Paris salons had taken to treating
Leonardo's dictum that 'art should be a mirror-image of reality' as an
excuse for mere vulgarity in a way that the great Italian master had
certainly never envisaged. Admiration for the ancient world had turned
from slavish devotion to the works of Plutarch to the prurient
sentimentality embodied in such works as Jean-Leon Gerome's The Auction
of a Female Slave. Similarly, the burgeoning interest in the attractions
of the mysterious East had resulted in no more than a host of portrayals
of nude beauties in tile-lined pools.
At the same time, the quest for natural depiction, for reality of
presentation, had stimulated the development of photography - which at
one stage was a bitter rival of painting. After all, Andre Malraux quite
rightly said that the one and only preoccupation of photography should
be to imitate art. In an endeavour somehow to outdo photography on its
own terms, painters resorted to copying three-dimensional nature in
minutely refined detail, using myriad brushstrokes. This was in itself
nothing less than an acknowledgement of painting's incapacity and
defeat. And such was the end of the Academy's domination, which had
lasted since the seventeenth century. The most liberated of the artists
of the Romantic era no longer bothered much with reality of
presentation: photography, by reproducing reality as an instant of
three-dimensional history caught forever, caused the final departure
from it.

Horace Pippin, Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1943

Emma Stern, Self-Portrait, 1964

Sava Sekulic, Portrait of a Man with Moustache

Marie Laurencin, The Italian, 1925
The famous words of Maurice Denis, written when he was only twenty years
old in 1890, take on a special significance in this respect. 'Remember
that a picture - before becoming a war-horse or a nude woman or a scene
from a story - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours
assembled in a particular order.' It was the masters of the very early
Renaissance years, already known customarily as 'primitives' in
nineteenth-century Europe, whose work could be used to provide guidance
in understanding the role of the flat surface as the basis for colour.
And this heritage had the potential to lead to that new Renaissance
which the future Impressionists dreamt of in their youth.
What the noted German philosopher Oswald Spengler called Der Untergang
des Abendlandes, 'the decline of the West' (which was the title of his
book), was also a powerful factor that increased the divide between
artists who chose to look hack to the system of the classical ancients
and artists who had no truck with such criteria. Political Eurocentrism
collapsed under the pressure of a complex multitude of pressures, and
did so at precisely this time - the threshold between the two centuries.
Yet by then European artists had already for some time been on the
look-out to learn new things from other parts of the world. So, for
instance, in their research into the 'mysterious East', the Romantic
youth of the I890s were also examining Japanese and Chinese art as
part of a search for different approaches to the 'flat surface' about
which Maurice Denis had written. Closer to home, Islamic art -
'primitive' in the most accomplished sense of the word — rose to
considerable popularity during the first decade of the twentieth
century, which increased follow ing large exhibitions in Paris and in
Germany.
The biggest boost to the new form of Romantic art came in the form of a
massive influx of works from the 'primitive' world - .some from Central
and South America, but most from Africa - that poured into Europe at the
turn of the twentieth century, chiefly through colonial agents. Until
this time, the only conceivable description of works of art from these
areas was as 'primitive'. The marvellous gold artefacts fashioned by
native Peruvians and Mexicans, which flooded Europe following the
discovery and colonisation of their lands, were regarded simply as
precious metal to be melted down and reworked. Museums did keep and
display items from Africa and the Pacific, but little interest was shown
in obtaining them.

Paul Gauguin,
Eiaha Ohipa, 1896
However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the territories of the
world open to European exploration and trade had expanded so
dramatically that far-off countries became objects not only of curiosity
but also of study. A new science - anthropology - was born. In 1882 an
anthropological museum opened in Paris. An Exhibition of Central America
took place in Madrid in 1893. And in 1898 the French discovered a rich
source of tribal art in their West African colony of Benin (called
Dahomey from 1899 to 1975).
So it was that although the first Exhibition of African Art was mounted
in Paris only in 1919, young artists had by then already been familiar
with African artefacts for quite a while. According to one art-dealer,
some of the Parisian artists had fair-sized personal collections from
black Africa and Oceania. It is more than possible that the German
Expressionist painter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff developed an interest in
collecting such items even earlier. His fellow Expressionist Ernst
Kirchner claimed that he had 'discovered' black African sculpture back
in 1904, in the anthropological museum.

Ivan Vecenaj, Dinner of the Night

Janko Brasic, Dance in Circle next to the Church
One event in particular marked a significant stage in the interface
between European and African art, in that it presaged the rejuvenation
of the former by the latter. The story was later narrated by the artist
Maurice de Vlaminck and his friends.
Vlaminck was travelling back from doing some sketches up in Argenteuil,
to the north-west of Paris, when he decided to stop at a bistro. There,
he was surprised to espy - between the racked bottles of Pernod - wooden
statuettes and masks, all of which had been brought from Africa by the
bistro-proprietor's son. Vlaminck purchased the lot there and then. Once
he had got home he showed them to his studio-companion Andre Derain, who
was so impressed that in turn he persuaded his friend to sell them all
on to him. Presumably Derain next took them over to Matisse's studio to
show him and the same thing happened yet again, because Picasso was
amazed to be shown them when he was invited to dinner specially by
Matisse. The story was concluded by Max Jacob, who recounted how he
discovered Picasso the next morning poring over a stack of
sketch-papers, on each one of which was an increasingly simplified head
of a woman.
Vlaminck perceived what was the most valuable point of things
'primitive'. 'Black African art manages by the simplest of means to
convey an impression of stateliness but also stillness.'' Nonetheless,
having passed through the hands of Vlaminck, Derain and Matisse -all of
them great artists - African sculpture directly affected only Pablo
Picasso. Vlaminck dated this story to 1905, although most likely it
actually happened a bit later. In any case, all the artists involved
were by then in a mood to accept primitive art as a complete and entire
phenomenon, not simply as a mass of individual and multifarious
items.Most significantly, Picasso gradually worked out how to reveal the
primal nature of objects thanks to the expressivity of African
sculpture. It was this discovery that provided the impetus for him to go
on to develop Cubism.
However primitive the sense of form presented by black African sculpture
might seem to the European eye, it represented an aesthetic school that
was centuries old and a tradition of
craftsmanship inherited from remote ancestors. That a system exists
means that it is possible to study it, to learn from it and to work to
it. This is why the influence of African carving on
European art has been so marked during the twentieth century.
Today, then, the art courses of many educational establishments focus on
the interrelationship between twentieth-century painting and black
African art, together with the influence of the art
forms of native North America, Oceania and Arabic/Islamic Africa on
European and North American artists from Gauguin up to the Surrealists.
As art expert Jean Laude has said, the
'discovery' of black African art by Europeans 'seems to be an integral
part of the general process of renewing sources; it is certainly a
contributory factor'.'' It was at the peak of this wave of enthusiasm,
at the very moment of 'the decline of the West', that the naive artists
emerged. There was no need to go searching for them in Africa or in
Oceania.

John Bensted, The Rousseau Banquet
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Discovery - the Banquet
in Rousseau's Honour
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Impressionism actually
had more of an effect upon art in general than it initially seemed to.
The rebellion against the 'tyranny' of the old and traditional system of
Classicism that it fomented - the establishing of the principle of
freedom in content, form, style and context — led to a broadening of the
whole concept of 'art' itself.
Towards the end of the Impressionist 'period' - so much so that they are
forever labelled Post-Impressionist - Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh
joined the Impressionists' ranks. What they lacked in training they made
up for in hard work. Indeed, only in the very early pictures of Gauguin
is any deficiency of skill evident. And when Van Gogh arrived in Paris
in 1886, no one expressed any doubts as to his worthiness to take his
place among the international clique of artists in the community in
Montmartre which by that time had existed there for nigh on a century.
Perhaps inevitably, the pair did not, however, find acceptance in the
salon dedicated to the most classical forms of contemporary art. They
were nonetheless able to exhibit their works to the public, especially
since Parisian art-dealers — marchands - were opening more and more
galleries. In 1884 the Salon des independants was launched. This had no
selection committee and was set up specifically to put on show the works
of those artists who painted for a living but were yet unable or
unwilling to meet the requirements of the official salons. Of course
there were many such artists - and of course among the overwhelming
multiplicity of their mostly talentless works it was not always easy to
identify those pictures that were exceptional in merit.
Henri Rousseau served as a customs officer at the Gate of Vanves in
Paris. In his free time he painted, sometimes on commission for his
neighbours and sometimes in exchange for food. Year after year from 1886
to 1910 he brought his work to the Salon des independants for display,
and year after year his work was exhibited with everybody else's despite
its total lack of professional worth. Nevertheless he was proud to be
numbered among the city's artists, and thoroughly enjoyed the right they
all had to see their works shown to the public like the more
accepted artists in the better salons.
Henri Rousseau was among the first in his generation to perceive the dawn of a
new era in art in which it was possible to grasp the notion of freedom -
freedom to aspire to be described as an artist irrespective of a
specific style of painting or the possession or lack of professional
qualifications. His famous picture (now in the National Gallery,
Prague), dated 18.90 and entitled Myself, Portrait-Landscape, rather
than the comparatively feeble self-portrait, reflected that selfsame
ebullient self-confidence that was a characteristic of his, and
established the image of the amateur artist taking his place in the
ranks of the professionals. "His most characteristic feature is that he
sports a bushy beard and has for some considerable time remained a
member of the Society of the Independents in the belief that a creative
personality whose ideas soar high above the rest should be granted the
right to equally unlimited freedom of self-expression", was what
Rousseau wrote about himself in his autobiographical notes.

Henri Rousseau,
Myself,
, Portrait-Landscape, 1890
It just so happened that Pablo Picasso visited a M. Soulier's
bric-a-brac shop in the Rue des Martyrs on a fairly regular basis:
sometimes he managed to sell one of his pictures to M. Soulier. On one
such occasion Picasso noticed a strange painting. It could have been
mistaken for a pastiche on the type of ceremonial portraits produced by
James Tissot or Charles-Emile-Auguste (Carolus-Duran) had it not been
for its extraordinary air of seriousness. The face of a rather
unattractive woman w as depicted with unusually precise detail given to
its individual features, yet with a sense of profound respect for the
sitter. Somehow the female figure - clothed in an austere costume
involving complex folds and creases and surrounded by an amazing panoply
of pansies in pots on a balcony, observing a prominent bird flying
across a clouded sky, and holding a large twig in one hand - looked for
all the world like a photographer's model as posed by an amateur
photographer, but still was hauntinglv realistic and arresting. The
artist was
Henri Rousseau. The price was five francs. Picasso bought it
and hung it in his studio.
In point of fact, it was not only Picasso who was interested in
Rousseau's work at this time. The art-dealer Ambroise Vollard had
already purchased some of Rousseau's paintings, and the young artists
Sonja and Robert Delaunay were friends of his, as was Wilhelm Uhde, the
German art critic who organised Rousseau's first solo exhibition in 1908
(on the premises of a Parisian furniture-dealer). But it was Picasso
who, with his friends, decided in that same year to hold a party in
Rousseau's honour. It took place in Picasso's studio in the Rue Ravignan
at a house called the Bateau-Lavoir. Some thirty people turned up, many
of them naturally Picasso's friends and neighbours, but others present
included the critic Maurice Raynal and the Americans Leo and Gertrude
Stein.
Decades later, during the 1960s, by which time the 'Rousseau banquet'
had become something of a legend in itself, one of the guests - the
naive artist Manuel Blasco Alarcon, who was Picasso's cousin - painted a
picture of the event from memory. Henri Rousseau was depicted standing
on a podium in front of one of his own works, and holding a violin.
Seated around a table meanwhile were various guests whom Alarcon
portrayed in the style of Picasso's Gertrude Stein and Henri Rousseau's
Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin.

Ivan Rabuzin,
Klower on the
Hill, 1988

Elena A. Volkova, Young Girl from Sibera
At the banquet all those years previously, the elderly ex-Douanier
Rousseau (then aged sixty-four, having retired from his customs post at
the age of forty-one in order to concentrate on art) found himself
surrounded mainly by vivacious young people intent on having a good time
but in a cultural sort of way. Poems were being recited even as supper
was being eaten. There was dancing to the music of George Braque on the
accordian and Rousseau on the violin - in fact, Rousseau played a waltz,
that he had composed himself' The party was .still going strong at dawn
the next day when Rousseau, emotional and more than half-asleep, was
finally put into a fiacre to take him home. (When he got out of the
fiacre, he left in it all the copies of the poems written for him by
Apollinaire and given to him solicitously as a celebratory present.)
Even after he had departed, the young people carried straight on with
the revels. Only later in the memories of the people who had been there
did this 'banquet' stand out in their minds as a truly remarkable
occasion. Only then did individual anecdotes about what happened there
take on the aspect of the mythical and the magical. Quite a few were to
remember a drunken Marie Laurencin falling over on to a selection of
scones and pastries. Others indelibly recalled Rousseau's declaration to
Picasso that "We two are the greatest artists of our time - you in the
Egyptian genre and me in the modern!"
This statement, arrogant as it might have seemed at the time to those
who heard it, was by no mleans as ridiculous as some of those present
might have supposed. As the story of the 'Rousseau banquet' spread
around the city of Paris and beyond, the people who had been there began
in their minds to edit what they had seen and heard in order to present
their own versions when asked. Six years later, in 1914, Maurice Raynal
narrated his recollections of it in Apollinaire's magazine Soirres de
Paris. Later still, Fernanda Olivier and Gertrude Stein wrote it up in
their respective memoirs. In his Souvenirs sans fin, Andre Salmon went
to considerable pains to point out that the 'banquet' was in no way
intended as a practical joke at Rousseau's expense, and that - despite
suggestions to the contrary - the party was meant utterly sincerely as a
celebration of Rousseau's art. Why else, he insisted, would
intellectuals like Picasso, Apollinaire and he himself, Andre Salmon,
have gone to the trouble of setting up the banquet in the first place?
This was too much for the French artist and sculptor Andre Derain who
publicly riposted to Salmon, "What is this.' A victory for
con-artistry?" Later, he was sorry for his outburst, particularly in
view of the tact that he rather admired Rousseau's work, and only
quarrelled with Maurice de Vlaminck, one of his best friends, when
Vlaminck was unwise enough to suggest in an interview with a journalist
that Derain was dismissive of Rousseau's work.
Only a few years later, and there was actually a squabble about who had
'discovered' Rousseau. The critic Gustavo Coquiot in a book entitled Independants expressed his exasperation at hearing people say that
it had been Wilhelm Uhde who had introduced Rousseau and his work to the
world. How was it, he asked indignantly, that some German fellow could
claim in 1908 to present for the first time to the Parisian public a
Parisian artist whose work had been on show in Paris to those who wanted
to see it ever since 1885 or earlier?
Writing enthusiastically about Rousseau's paintings, and praising his
unique style, Coquiot went on to make an interesting comment. "There
must he many an amateur artist in France — Sunday painters who for the
rest of the week may be working men, tradesmen or businessmen. I once
gave the artist Vlaminek a painting called Dance of the Bayadere,
produced by a wine merchant from Narbonne. It was a rather pretentious
canvas in the style of Rousseau. But the point is that on another
occasion the same merchant painted a picture he called Place de I'Opera
which did indeed show the Opera in all its intricate detail. Now that is
surely amazing!" n
These words of Coquiot mark a new- line in the spectrum that is the
history of naive art. Discussion and appreciation of Rousseau's works
inevitably led to discussion and (sometimes) appreciation of the works
of others in similar vein. Accordingly, some perhaps not so talented but
undoubtedly original artists were noticed and even encouraged to come
forward. A chain of 'discoveries' ensued. 'Primitive1 and 'naive' art
was suddenly all around - to the extent that professional artists were
becoming heavily involved.
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Mihai Dascalu, The Broken
Bridge

Mihai Dascalu, Close to the Wind mill
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