Naive Art. In Quest Of Lost Paradise

With a representative selection of some 200 pictures from the Charlotte Zander Museum at Bönnigheim Castle, near Stuttgart, KunstHausWien takes pleasure in exhibiting a portion of the world´s largest collection of Naive Art and Art Brut.

The French "classics" Henri Rousseau, André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis and Louis Vivin, along with naive artists from the former Yugoslavia and from Germany, Poland, Austria, Russia and the U.S., are represented with significant groups of works.
The works of the naive artists were first discovered at the beginning of the past century by artists and collectors of classical Modernism and recognised as forms of expression in their own right. The French avant-garde, Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, but also Vasily Kandinsky and the artists of the ³Blue Horseman² group prized the magic and originality of the pictures of the "customs officer" Rousseau, and although the works of the naive artists can be called neither folk nor academic art, they have long since found their way into the major museums (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Musée national d'art moderne, Paris; Pushkin Museum, Moscow). Naive art comes about thanks to the artist´s wealth of imagination, without academic training and unencumbered by artistic traditions or fashion. It is created by people from widely divergent population groups who have one thing in common: the existential need to express themselves - painting, creating form.