Naive art first became popular at the end of the 19th century. Until that time, this form of expression, created by untrained artists and characterised by spontaneity and simplicity, enjoyed little recognition from professional artists and art critics. Influenced by primitive arts, naive painting is distinguished by the fluidity of its lines, vivacity, and joyful colours, as well as by its rather clean-cut, simple shapes.
Naive art counts among it artists: Henri Rousseau, Séraphine de Senlis, André Bauchant, and Camille Bombois. This movement has also found adherents abroad, including such prominent artists as Joan Miró, Guido Vedovato, Niko Pirosmani, and Ivan Generalic.

Naive Art

Alfred Sisley (18391899) angol nemzetiség?, de Franciaországban él? és alkotó fest?m?vész, sokak szerint a legtisztább impresszionista. Összesen mintegy 900 olajfestményt alkotott. Tájképein, ahol embereket alig ábrázol, els?sorban a fények játéka dominál. Felt?n? a hó iránti lelkesedése. Egy barátjának küldtt levelében írta: Minden festmény olyan helyet ábrázol, amelybe a fest? beleszeretett.

Sisley

A painter of the Impressionist movement, Alfred Sisley was born on October 30th 1839 in Paris but was of British origin. He died on January 29th 1899 in Moret-sur-Loing. Growing up in a musical family, he chose to pursue painting rather than the field of business. In 1862 he enrolled in Gleyre's studio where he encountered Renoir, Monet, and Bazille. The four friends left their master's studio in March 1863 to work outdoors, setting their easels to paint the forest scenes of Fontainebleau. 
Sisley tirelessly chose the sky and water as subjects for his paintings, animated as they were by the changing reflections of light, for his landscapes of the regions surrounding Paris, Louveciennes, and Marly-le-Roi. This was in keeping with the painting styles of Constable, Bonington, and Turnet. Even if he had been influenced by Monet's work at some point, Sisley drew away from his friend's style due to his own desire for his work to follow the structure of forms. Sensitive to the changing seasons, he liked to portray spring with its blooming orchards, but it was the wintry and snowy countryside which Sisley was particularly attracted to. His reserved temperament preferred mystery and silence to the splendour of Renoir's sunny landscapes.

Die Naive Kunst, die von ungelernten Malern geschaffen wurde und sich durch ihre Spontaneität und Einfachheit definiert, war bis zu ihrer Entdeckung durch professionelle Künstler und Kritiker Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts wenig bekannt. Durch primitivere Kunstformen beeinflusst zeichnet sich Naive Malerei durch klare Linien, einfache Formen, Lebendigkeit und frhliche Farben aus.

Franzsiche Künstler wie Henri Rousseau, Séraphine de Senlis, André Bauchant und Camille Bombois gehren zu den Hauptrepräsentanten. Nichtdestotrotz gibt es auch in anderen Ländern bekannte Künstler wie Guido Vedovato, Niko Pirosmani und Ivan Generalic. Dieses Buch präsentiert die große Bandbreite der Naiven Kunst in praktischem Format und ist so das perfekte Geschenk für alle Kunstbegeisterten.

Naive Kunst

For Claude Monet the designation 'impressionist' always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the end of his very long life. He was so by deep conviction, and for his Impressionism he may have sacrificed many other opportunities that his enormous talent held out to him. Monet did not paint classical compositions with figures, and he did not become a portraitist, although his professional training included those skills. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved a degree of perfection none of his contemporaries managed to attain. Yet the little boy began by drawing caricatures. Boudin advised Monet to stop doing caricatures and to take up landscapes instead. The sea, the sky, animals, people, and trees are beautiful in the exact state in which nature created them - surrounded by air and light. Indeed, it was Boudin who passed on to Monet his conviction of the importance of working in the open air, which Monet would in turn transmit to his impressionist friends. Monet did not want to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He chose to attend a private school, L'Académie Suisse, established by an ex-model on the Quai d'Orfèvres near the Pont Saint-Michel. One could draw and paint from a live model there for a modest fee. This was where Monet met the future impressionist Camille Pissarro. Later in Gleyre's studio, Monet met Auguste Renoir Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Monet considered it very important that Boudin be introduced to his new friends. He also told his friends of another painter he had found in Normandy. This was the remarkable Dutchman Jongkind. His landscapes were saturated with colour, and their sincerity, at times even their naïveté, was combined with subtle observation of the Normandy shore's variable nature. At this time Monet's landscapes were not yet characterized by great richness of colour. Rather, they recalled the tonalities of paintings by the Barbizon artists, and Boudin's seascapes. He composed a range of colour based on yellow-brown or blue-grey. At the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 Monet presented a series of paintings for the first time: seven views of the Saint-Lazare train station. He selected them from among twelve he had painted at the station. This motif in Monet's work is in line not only with Manet's Chemin de fer (The Railway) and with his own landscapes featuring trains and stations at Argenteuil, but also with a trend that surfaced after the railways first began to appear. In 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. At Giverny, series painting became one of his chief working procedures. Meadows became his permanent workplace. When a journalist, who had come from Vétheuil to interview Monet, asked him where his studio was, the painter answered, "My studio! I've never had a studio, and I can't see why one would lock oneself up in a room. To draw, yes - to paint, no". Then, broadly gesturing towards the Seine, the hills, and the silhouette of the little town, he declared, "There's my real studio."Monet began to go to London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He began all his London paintings working directly from nature, but completed many of them afterwards, at Giverny. The series formed an indivisible whole, and the painter had to work on all his canvases at one time. A friend of Monet's, the writer Octave Mirbeau, wrote that he had accomplished a miracle. With the help of colours he had succeeded in recreating on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: he was reproducing sunlight, enriching it with an infinite number of reflections. Alone among the impressionists, Claude Monet took an almost scientific study of the possibilities of colour to its limits; it is unlikely that one could have gone any further in that direction.

Monet

Paul Gauguin was first a sailor, then a successful stockbroker in Paris. In 1874 he began to paint at weekends as a Sunday painter. Nine years later, after a stock-market crash, he felt confident of his ability to earn a living for his family by painting and he resigned his position and took up the painter's brush full time. Following the lead of Cézanne, Gauguin painted still-lifes from the very beginning of his artistic career. He even owned a still-life by Cézanne, which is shown in Gauguin's painting Portrait of Marie Lagadu. The year 1891 was crucial for Gauguin. In that year he left France for Tahiti, where he stayed till 1893. This stay in Tahiti determined his future life and career, for in 1895, after a sojourn in France, he returned there for good. In Tahiti, Gauguin discovered primitive art, with its flat forms and violent colours, belonging to an untamed nature. With absolute sincerity, he transferred them onto his canvas. His paintings from then on reflected this style: a radical simplification of drawing; brilliant, pure, bright colours; an ornamental type composition; and a deliberate flatness of planes. Gauguin termed this style "synthetic symbolism".

Gauguin

Toulouse-Lautrec begann noch während seines Studiums das Pariser Nachtleben zu erkunden; es sollte ihm zur wichtigsten Quelle der Inspiration werden und schließlich auch zur Beeinträchtigung seiner Gesundheit führen. Das Paris der 1890er Jahre mit seinen schillernden Charakteren kann man nur durch die Augen Lautrecs wahrnehmen. Die erste bedeutende Persönlichkeit des Pariser Nachtlebens, der Lautrec begegnete, war der berühmte Cabaretsänger Aristide Bruant (1851 bis 1925), ein Mann, der Lautrec ganz wesentlich darin unterstützte, seine eigene künstlerische Vision zu entwickeln. In den 1890er Jahren inspirierten Lautrec zahlreiche Bühnenkünstler: die auf dem berühmten Plakat des Moulin Rouge zu sehenden Tänzerinnen La Goulue und Jane Avril oder Loïe Fuller, die Sängerinnen May Belfort, Yvette Guilbert und Marcelle Lender sowie die Schauspielerin Réjane. Lautrecs Aufrichtigkeit, mit der er viele Aspekte des Lebens abbildete, die die meisten seiner höher geachteten Zeitgenossen lieber unter den Teppich kehrten, erregte erwartungsgemäß Anstoß. Der deutsche Kunstkritiker Gensel schrieb: "Von Verehrung kann natürlich bei diesem Meister in der Darstellung alles Gemeinen und Perversen von vornherein nicht die Rede sein. Dass man Schweinereien - es gibt keinen milderen Ausdruck dafür - wie Elles öffentlich ausstellen darf, ohne einen Schrei der Entrüstung zu hören, erklärt sich nur daraus, dass ein Teil des großen Publikums den Sinn dieses Zyklus gar nicht versteht und ein anderer sich schämt, sein Verständnis einzugestehen!"

Toulouse-Lautrec

Cézannes glücklichste Zeit war seine frühe Jugend in der Provence, wo er zusammen mit Zola und einem anderen Freund in der Natur umherstreifte. Ermutigt durch Renoir, stellte er 1874 und 1877 zusammen mit den Impressionisten aus. Doch die ablehnende Haltung, mit der man seiner Kunst begegnete, verletzte ihn tief. Er malte gern Früchte, weil sie gehorsame Modelle waren, was seiner langsamen Arbeitsweise entgegenkam, dabei behielt er die dominante Farbe und den Charakter der Frucht bei, verstärkte aber den emotionalen Reiz der Form durch ein Spiel von reichen, fein aufeinander abgestimmten Farbwerten. Seine eigentliche Meisterschaft entfaltete er in den Stillleben. Cézanne verstand es, seine Malkunst mit Wissen zu bereichern, dem Wissen um die Dinge - dieser unabdingbaren Voraussetzung für alles schöpferische Bemühen. Kurz nach dem Tod seines Vaters zog er sich für immer auf sein Gut in der Provence zurück und war vermutlich dort der einsamste Maler seiner Zeit. Von Zeit zu Zeit überfiel ihn eine seltsame Melancholie, ja sogar eine düstere Hoffnungslosigkeit. Er konnte unberechenbar und schwierig sein, seine Leinwände zerstören oder sie zum Fenster seines Studios hinauswerfen, sie ganz einfach auf einer Wiese stehen lassen oder sie seinem Sohn geben, der sie zerschnitt und wie ein Puzzle wieder zusammensetzte. Zu Beginn des neuen Jahrhunderts holten die Bauern aus ihren Scheunen eine größere Menge von Stillleben und Landschaften, als sie hörten, dass ein Narr aus Paris dafür mit gutem Geld zahlte. Doch leider kam die Anerkennung zu spät. Er starb 1906 an einem Fieber, das er sich zugezogen hatte, als er beim Malen vom Regen überrascht wurde.

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