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Folk Art
Folk Art is art which does not come out of the fine art tradition. Folk
Artists are typically from rural or pre-industrial societies, and are more
closely related to craftsmen than they are to fine artists.
Folk Art is characterized by a naive style, in which traditional rules of
proportion and perspective are not employed.
Closely related terms are Outsider Art, Self-Taught Art and Naive Art.
Well-known Folk Artists include the American painters
Grandma
Moses and Edward
Hicks, and the Canadian painter Maud Lewis.
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Naive art
Term applied to the work of non-professional, self-taught
artists who, while lacking orthodox skills, apply themselves
to their art in a resolute and independent spirit.
The history of naive art is both the history of the complex
evolution of the many art forms lying outside the fine arts
tradition and of the critical attempts to disentangle a
distinct strand from this broader fabric. In the course of the
19th century in Europe, the arts and crafts of rural peoples
(normally termed FOLK ART, or sometimes ‘peasant art’) and the
urban traditions of semi-skilled craftsmen gradually faltered
in the face of growing industrialization. Factory products
enfeebled the individual impulse to fashion handmade artefacts;
itinerant portrait painters (‘limners’) found their trade
dwindling after the advent of photography; and in general the
rise of an industry-based economy and the growth of cities
sapped the vitality of vernacular and communally recognized
artwork such as embroidery, toymaking, the carving of ships’
figureheads, painted targets and so forth. Similar
developments took place in North America, though at a slower
pace, partly determined by a wilful defence of inherited
models on the part of culture-conscious immigrants.
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Girl of the
Bangs-Phelps Family |
Erastus
Salisbury Field
(b Leverett, MA, 19 May 1805; d Leverett, 28 June
1900).
American painter. He studied with Samuel F. B. Morse in New York
during the winter of 1824–5. On his return to the rural isolation
of Leverett, MA, he painted his earliest known work, the portrait
of his grandmother Elizabeth Billings Ashley (Springfield,
MA, Mus. F.A.). His career as an itinerant portrait painter began
in 1826, most of his commissions coming through a network of
family associations in western Massachusetts and Connecticut. The
portraits of 1836–40 are considered his best. From 1841 he lived
mainly in New York, where he expanded his subject-matter to
include landscapes and American history pictures. There he
presumably studied photography, for on his return to Massachusetts
he advertised himself as a daguerreotypist. His few portraits
painted after 1841 are copied from his own photographs and lack
the expressive characterization and decorative power of his
earlier work. From 1865 to 1885 his paintings were based primarily
on biblical and patriotic themes. The Historical Monument of
the American Republic (1867–88; Springfield, MA, Mus. F.A.)
stands alone in American folk art in size, scope and imaginative
vision. Inspired by plans for a national celebration of the
centennial of the USA in 1876, Field painted an architectural
fantasy of eight towers linked by railway bridges and trains at
the tops, with the history of the USA in low-relief sculpture on
the exterior surfaces of the towers. Field added two more towers
to the painting in 1888 and thereafter retired.
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The Garden of Eden, 1865
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Pharaoh's Army Marching, 1865
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Historic Monument of the American Republic
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Pharaoh's Army Marching, 1865
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Das Paradies,1860
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Portrait
of Austin Marsh
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The Death of the First Born
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Egyptian Scene
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see also:
Edward Hicks
Ammi Phillips
Niko Pirosmani
Henry Darger
Ivan Generalic
Ivan Rabuzin
Charles Wysocki
Adrie Martens
EXPLORATION:
Grandma Moses |
Naive art
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
also spelled Naïf Art, work of artists in sophisticated societies who
lack or reject conventional expertise in the representation or
depiction 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
, whose portraits, jungle
scenes, and exotic vegetation are widely admired.
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.
The appreciation of naïve art has been a fairly recent phenomenon:
many of the artists still living never expected their work to be so
eagerly collected. By the mid-20th century most developed nations had
naïve artists who had risen to some prominence. While some naïve
painters consider themselves professional artists and seek public
recognition of their work, others refuse to exhibit for profit and
paint only for their families or for religious institutions.
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Garden Spray
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John Kane
born August 19, 1860, West Calder, Scotland
died August 10, 1934, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
original name John Cain Scottish-born American artist who painted
primitivist scenes of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Scotland.
In 1879, after working in a coal mine since childhood, John Cain
immigrated to the United States (where a banker's misspelling changed
his name to Kane). He worked as a steelworker, gandy dancer (railroad
man who stamps gravel between the ties), street paver, house painter,
carpenter, andamateur boxer. After losing a leg in a railroad
accident, he became a watchman and a boxcar painter. For his own
pleasure he would paint landscapes on boxcars during his lunch break,
covering them over with regulation flat paint in the afternoon. After
losing his job in 1900, he continued painting landscapes and made a
modest living colouring portrait photographs. He left his wife and
home after the death of an infant son in 1904 and began to paint on
beaverboard landscapes of the Pennsylvania countryside and cityscapes
of Pittsburgh. He lived apart from his wife for the next 23 years.
Although he attempted to enter art schools on a number of occasions,
Kane was unable to pay tuition. About 1908 he served, for a short
period, as a studio assistant to the artist John White Alexander. His
works were discovered in 1927, when his Scene from the Scottish
Highland was accepted by the Carnegie International Exhibition in
Pittsburgh. He won a prize at the Carnegie two years later, and
museums began seeking his works. His autobiography, Sky Hooks, was
published posthumously in 1938. An intense self-portrait (1929) in the
collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is his
best-known work.
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Balmoral Castle
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Farm scene with three horses, 1931
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Touching Up,
1927
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Girl on a Park Bench with Cat
and Dog
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Maud Lewis
(Canadian Folk Artist,
1903-1970)
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Seagulls
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Covered Bridge
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Covered Bridge In Winter
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The Wharfs at Digby, Nova Scotia
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Team With
Sled And Logs
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Three Black Cats
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Schoolyard
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Carriage
Crossing Ford
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Skiers
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Boats in Harbor
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Nina Barka
(1908-1986)
was an important female naive
artist whose real name was Marie Smirsky.
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Caroline cherie, 1968
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The judgment of Paris
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Orphee
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see also
EXPLORATION:
Grandma Moses
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Grandma Moses
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born September 7, 1860, Greenwich, New York, U.S.
died December 13, 1961, Hoosick Falls
byname of Anna Mary Robertson Moses , original name Anna Mary
Robertson American folk painter who was internationally popular for
her naive documentation of rural life in the United States in the late
19th and early 20th centuries.
Anna Robertson had only sporadic periods of schooling during her
childhood. At age 12 she left her parents' farm and worked as a hired
girl until she married Thomas Moses in 1887. They first farmed in the
Shenandoah Valley near Staunton, Virginia, and in 1905 moved to a farm
at Eagle Bridge, New York, near her birthplace. Thomas died in 1927,
and Anna continued to farm with the help of her youngest son until
advancing age forced her to retire to a daughter's home in 1936.
As a child the artist had drawn pictures and coloured them with the
juice of berries and grapes. After her husband died she created
worsted-embroidery pictures, and, when her arthritis made manipulating
a needle too difficult, she turned to painting. At first she copied
illustrated postcards and Currier & Ives prints, but gradually she
began to re-create scenes from her childhood, as in Apple Pickers (c.
1940), Sugaring-Off in the Maple Orchard (1940), Catching the
Thanksgiving Turkey (1943), and Over the River to Grandma's House (c.
1944). Her early paintings were given away or sold for small sums. In
1939 Louis Caldor, an engineer and art collector, was impressed when
he saw several of her paintings hanging in a drugstore window in
Hoosick Falls, New York. He drove to her farm and bought herremaining
stock of 15 paintings. In October of that year three of those paintings
were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in a show
titled “Contemporary, Unknown Painters.”
From the beginning Grandma Moses's work received favourable criticism.
In October 1940 a one-woman show of 35 paintings was held at Galerie
St. Etienne in New York. Thereafter her paintings were shown throughout
the United States and Europe in some 150 solo shows and 100 group
exhibits. Throughout her lifetime Grandma Moses produced about 2,000
paintings, most of them on masonite board. Her naive style (labeled
“American Primitive” by art historians) was acclaimed for its purity
of colour, its attention to detail, and its vigour. Her other notable
paintings include Black Horses (1942), Out for the Christmas Trees
(1946), The Old Oaken Bucket (1946), From My Window (1949), and Making
Apple Butter (1958). From 1946 her paintings were often reproduced in
prints and on Christmas cards. Her autobiography, My Life's History,
was published in 1952.
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Josip
Generalic
b. 1936
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The Hlebine Jadwiga
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see also:
Edward Hicks
Ammi Phillips
EXPLORATION:
Grandma Moses
Niko Pirosmani
Henry Darger
Ivan Generalic
Ivan Rabuzin
Charles Wysocki
Adrie Martens
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