Primitivism is naive art. This is brilliant Primitive painting painting

The primitivism style in painting has found wide application. First of all, representatives of this trend were self-taught artists who did not have sufficient professional skills, but sought to show themselves and their vision of the world. Like any other innovation, primitivism caused a great deal. Artists who achieved fame for many years after studying were dissatisfied with the new direction of painting, which did not take half of the creators’ lives to polish their artistic skills. However, most art critics liked the simple masterpieces, and primitivism still took its place in the huge variety of styles.

Features of primitivism

Primitivism in painting is characterized by a simplification of images: artists distort the world around them, making the paintings more like ordinary children's drawings. However, the changes were made intentionally: through the illusion of simplicity and carelessness, the deep meaning of the work is visible. As in all other artistic styles, details are important in primitivism - they carry the main semantic load.

Art Brut

Art Brut is an important branch of primitivism. A synonym for the definition is the term "outsider art." The works of this industry represent the world of the mentally ill or freaks who once moved away from society and plunged into a special reality. An important feature of Art Brut is the complete absence of clear boundaries between the artist’s fantasies and real life. The abundance of small details suggests the thoughtlessness of life and the vain haste of the modern world - this is one of the most common author's messages of Art Brut.

The opinion that no idea is hidden behind the naivety of images is erroneous. Primitivism is imbued not with surroundings, but with the inner state of the soul. It can be noticed only after careful examination and analysis of the depicted details - a quick glance is inappropriate here.

How to learn to correctly identify primitivism in painting

Primitivism does not exist without the naivety and spontaneous inspiration of the author. A person who encounters such stories for the first time experiences a feeling similar to nostalgia. A child's vision of the world consists of broken proportions, bright and saturated colors, and deep moral overtones. A person in primitivism looks more like a doll than a real character - this adds mystery to him.

The ability to pay attention to details and interpret them correctly is a real talent. When determining the artistic style, it will not be superfluous. You can learn to understand the artist on your own. To do this, it is worth remembering several important criteria, noticing which it will be easy to distinguish works of primitivism from surrealism.

First, pure colors. An abundance of tones and halftones, chiaroscuro, depth of space - this is not primitivism. Naive art uses pure pastel colors or, on the contrary, overly bright colors. Secondly, broken proportions. If the picture resembles stylized illustrations for a science fiction book, then it is primitivism. Thirdly, mixing reality with fantasy ideas - primitivism in painting combines a calm landscape and too flashy colors, humans and incredible creatures.

Prominent representatives of the primitivism style

Modern painting is full of not only abstractionists and surrealists. Primitivism opened the way for many talented creators whose work had not previously been recognized. Among them are Grandmother Moses, Henri Rousseau, Niko Pirosmani, Maria Primachenko, Alena Azernaya and many others. Paintings by the most famous primitivist artists are kept in the Museum of Naïve Art in Nice.

The world of childhood

Primitivism occupies a special place in painting. This is primarily due to the unique ability of artists to immerse a person in a world of carelessness, naivety and spiritual purity. Despite the lack of artistic education among many primitivists, the paintings are filled with what most other movements lack: mood. Art lovers understand and appreciate this, which is why works in the primitivism genre are so popular.

from primitivus /lat./ - first, earliest (since the 1890s)

Appeal to cultural objects of exotic civilizations, mainly Africa and Oceania, is one of the most fruitful strategies of avant-garde art. In time, this coincides with the maximum spread of colonialism, the development of ethnography as a science, and the formation of specific collections. The concepts of “primitive” or “wild”, using which Gauguin created a new image of the artist, united all the ideas and fantasies on the theme of the myth of the creation of the world. The charm of the primitive pushed aside the fascination with the exotic, which began with the Orientalism of Delacroix and continued in the Japaneseism of the Impressionists, the Nabids and the followers of Gauguin. “Van Gogh had Japanese prints, we have Africa,” wrote Picasso. The artists traveled and, more often, visited ethnographic museums: the Trocadero in Paris, the Volkerkunde Museum in Dresden and the British Museum in London. Masks and statues, instead of the style standards of Western culture, became exemplary models for primitivism. They were outside the usual tradition and suggested to artists almost ready-made solutions of a simplified, abstract form. Fundamentally important for Picasso and for the emergence of Cubism, such objects helped the Expressionists distance themselves from the world of civilization. Children's drawings and folk art began to be classified as works of art. In the almanac "The Blue Rider" they were called a new artistic tradition that would lead to the disappearance of the boundaries between high and low culture. In the next decade, style negre (Negro style) would become a phenomenon influencing fashion, music, theater and design.

Artists: Constantin Brancusi, Andre Derain, Max Ernst, Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Henri Matisse ), Amedeo Clemente Modigliani, Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso.

Exhibitions: 1923, Paris, Museum of Decorative Arts "Exhibition of Native Art of the Colonies of Africa and Oceania"; 1984, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) "Primitivism in the art of the 20th century."

Lyrics: G. Apollinaire "Art and curiosity: the first steps of cubism", 1912; Almanac "Blue Rider", 1912; R. Fry "Negro sculpture", 1920; P. Guillaume "Negro sculptural primitive", 1925.

Description of some works:

Pablo Picasso "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", 1907. Oil on canvas. New York, Museum of Modern Art. In this painting, Picasso gave his own version of the theme of prostitution, using two examples of primitive art. The heads of the three women on the left reproduce the style of prehistoric sculpture of the Iberian Osuna culture, discovered in 1906. The apotropaic mask-like faces of the two figures on the right are inspired by exhibits from the Trocadéro ethnographic museum. Picasso went there in the winter of 1906/07. Turning to the primitive opened the way to distortion and deformation - the favorite techniques of Cubism. Five naked figures are united and divided. The bodies, painted in wide planes of dim tone from different perspective angles, seem completely isolated from each other. The angularity of the disproportionate figures gives the painting the monumental properties of sculpture, the impression of carved relief, especially vivid due to the obvious geometrization. Historian and collector Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler considered this work “the beginning of Cubism, its first sprout.” The painting was practically not available to the public until 1937, when the work ended up in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Naive art is usually considered as one of the areas of the primitive. By N.I. we mean the creativity of self-taught artists (and “half-educated”), amateur artists; sometimes some forms of folk art. It is not always possible to distinguish these areas with sufficient clarity.

In practice, the terms naive art and primitive are not always used as identical. Naive art is more often called the works of artists who, relatively speaking, “play on the field” of professional art: they reproduce genres, subjects, aesthetic “standards” characteristic of it, and, to some extent, methods of execution. But at the same time, their work reveals a discrepancy with academic criteria in one way or another, which may look like inferiority, or may give the work the charm of “naivety.” From this point of view, typical works of naive art can be called the paintings “Three Days Before the Duel” by M. Belova (1983), “A Young Woman in Love” by an unknown author (late 18th century, France). The mentioned distinction between naive art and primitive art is not generally accepted.

Primitive - from lat. first, earliest. In accordance with the meaning of the word, primitive were originally called phenomena of art related to the early stages of the development of artistic styles. Thus, the Greek archaic is primitive, in comparison with the Greek classics and Hellenism; Western European painting of the Middle Ages, compared with the Renaissance. Primitive art began to be called primitive when it was discovered, etc. Since the 19th century, many have seen in these phenomena of art not only insufficiently polished professional skills, but also the advantages of integrity, simplicity, sincerity, and power of influence.

In the 20th century, the concept of primitive came closer to the concept of naive art and included the art of self-taught artists and amateurs (“hobbies”, “art on weekends”). Of the primitive artists, A. Russo, N. Pirosmani (Pirosmanashvili), and Balkan artists (I. Generalich and others) gained international fame.

Primitive art is different not only from the art of professionals, but also from folk art with its centuries-old traditions, canons, deep symbolism and the undetectability of personal authorship. At the same time, the spirit of the primitive and its characteristic expressive techniques still bring it closer to folk art.
Primitive art, like archaic and children's art, had a strong influence on professional artists of the 20th century, which led to the emergence of such a movement as primitivism. In some publications, no distinction is made between primitiveness and primitivism; then, along with “primitive” artists, professional “primitivist” artists are also mentioned.

Primitivism is a trend in professional art of the late 19th-20th centuries, consciously focused on “non-professional” examples: archaic and traditional forms of art of different peoples, children’s creativity, as well as the art of self-taught artists. In these phenomena of art, sophisticated masters of the 19th and 20th centuries saw what they believed they themselves lacked: sincerity, unintentionality, simplicity, integrity, vivid expressiveness, a related attitude to nature, etc.
To one degree or another, many prominent European masters can be called primitivists: P. Gauguin and his followers, cubists (P. Picasso and others), fauvists (A. Matisse and others), Dadaists, some abstractionists, etc. In Russia - artists who were members of the associations “Blue Rose”, “Jack of Diamonds”, “Donkey’s Tail”, etc.

Pankov Konstantin Alekseevich is a primitive artist, Nenets by nationality. In childhood and youth, he lived the life of fishermen and hunters, in inextricable unity with his native nature. What is striking about Pankov’s work is the invariably bright, positive tone and cheerful sense of life in all phenomena of the world. Exquisitely precise, musical and subtle in color, his paintings evoke in a modern big city resident the feeling of a dream or a dream - and at the same time they are extremely reliable in all everyday details.
In the 1930s, Pankov studied at the art workshop of the Leningrad Institute of Northern Peoples. Pankov's works, like those of other northern artists, were demonstrated in the Soviet pavilion at the international exhibition in Paris in 1937 and were awarded the Grand Prix.
In 1942, the sniper and scout Pankov was killed on the Volkhov Front.

Although his fame is not comparable to the international fame of Henri Rousseau and even Pirosmanashvili, the works he created are in no way inferior to the work of these brilliantly gifted self-taught artists.
Pirosmani Niko (Nikolai Aslanovich Pirosmanashvili, 1862-1918) is a self-taught Georgian artist, one of the most famous representatives of primitive art.
A native of the village, Pirosmani lived in Tiflis (Tbilisi) from his youth, worked as a servant, a conductor on the railway, sold milk, and wandered; To earn money, he painted paintings and signs on black oilcloth for taverns, shops, inns, and wine cellars.
In 1912, Russian avant-garde artists (I. Zdanevich and others) “discovered” him, began to support him financially, and tried to introduce him into the society of the creative intelligentsia.

Pirosmani painted not only signs - “still lifes”, but also portraits, everyday scenes, animals, panoramas of Georgia. He knew how to give everyday life and holidays of life a solemn, ritual significance; his multiple compositions are imbued with a sense of the unity of being. Pirosmani's art is characterized by majestic simplicity of forms, a uniquely individual and at the same time brightly national flavor.
Rousseau, Henri (1844-1910) - French artist, the first representative of primitive art to gain international fame. He served at customs for almost a quarter of a century, and in artistic circles received the nickname Customs Officer. He resigned to devote himself entirely to painting, but did not achieve recognition and died in poverty.
Fame came to Rousseau after his death. The attitude of his professional contemporaries towards him was ambivalent: the “masters” did not take him quite seriously, haughtily, as a self-taught person - and at the same time they could not help but see his exceptional talent, the expressiveness of his works, akin to archaic and children's art.

Rousseau's art is distinguished by the unfettered boldness of his plans, the brightness of his color schemes, and a kind of monumentality of his images: he does not divide what is depicted into more or less important, and is equally attentive to any detail (which is generally characteristic of primitive art).
Some scientists note that for a child everything he sees around him is of equal value and equally interesting. And therefore, no matter how much he details the image, it does not lose its integrity because of this. The child does not deliberately divide the picture of the world into the main and the secondary, into “figure and background,” as psychologists say, or, using musical terminology, into “melody and accompaniment.”
I think this applies to many primitive artists as well. Let us consider from this point of view the leaves of the trees and other details of K. Pankov’s paintings; Let's look at A. Russo's painting, where a cheetah and a horse look like some kind of bright insect swarming among the large stems and flowers of the foreground. What is the main thing here, what is secondary?

Many children and primitives have some kind of detached positive and consistent attitude towards what they depict. For example, Bruegel, like our Pankov, painted broad paintings of nature and human labor and life, cheerful at first glance - but, taking a closer look at people, their actions and celebrations, we will feel a certain gloomy ambiguity of the author’s attitude, which the simple-minded does not have at all Nenets

Primitive art seems to be timeless - like children's art, and in a certain sense, like childhood itself. It also has similarities with the archaic. Like children's creativity, it has probably always existed in one form or another. And at the same time, this is the most characteristic cultural phenomenon of the 20th century. Like children's art, primitive art could be noticed and elevated to the rank of high artistic value not earlier than the end of the 19th century, but mainly in the 20th century. Some elements of naive art can be found in the modern show house 2, which makes it even more popular.

Why? This is one of the interesting questions for discussion, but not the only one. There are many such questions. Do children like primitive artists? Do they see their similarities with them, their differences from the “classic” artists? Do you notice any similarities with decorative and applied arts, fine folklore, with archaic art and with those artists of the 20th century who deliberately borrowed a lot from the archaic and from the children themselves?

) in her expressive, sweeping works was able to preserve the transparency of the fog, the lightness of the sail, and the smooth rocking of the ship on the waves.

Her paintings amaze with their depth, volume, richness, and the texture is such that it is impossible to take your eyes off them.

Warm simplicity of Valentin Gubarev

Primitivist artist from Minsk Valentin Gubarev doesn't chase fame and just does what he loves. His work is incredibly popular abroad, but almost unknown to his compatriots. In the mid-90s, the French fell in love with his everyday sketches and signed a contract with the artist for 16 years. The paintings, which, it would seem, should only be understandable to us, bearers of the “modest charm of undeveloped socialism,” appealed to the European public, and exhibitions began in Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain and other countries.

Sensual realism of Sergei Marshennikov

Sergei Marshennikov is 41 years old. He lives in St. Petersburg and works in the best traditions of the classical Russian school of realistic portraiture. The heroines of his canvases are women who are tender and defenseless in their half-nakedness. Many of the most famous paintings depict the artist's muse and wife, Natalya.

The Myopic World of Philip Barlow

In the modern era of high-resolution images and the rise of hyperrealism, the work of Philip Barlow immediately attracts attention. However, a certain effort is required from the viewer in order to force himself to look at the blurry silhouettes and bright spots on the author’s canvases. This is probably how people suffering from myopia see the world without glasses and contact lenses.

Sunny bunnies by Laurent Parselier

The painting of Laurent Parcelier is an amazing world in which there is neither sadness nor despondency. You won’t find gloomy and rainy pictures from him. His canvases contain a lot of light, air and bright colors, which the artist applies with characteristic, recognizable strokes. This creates the feeling that the paintings are woven from a thousand sunbeams.

Urban dynamics in the works of Jeremy Mann

American artist Jeremy Mann paints dynamic portraits of a modern metropolis in oil on wood panels. “Abstract shapes, lines, the contrast of light and dark spots - all create a picture that evokes the feeling that a person experiences in the crowd and bustle of the city, but can also express the calm that is found when contemplating quiet beauty,” says the artist.

The Illusory World of Neil Simon

In the paintings of British artist Neil Simone, nothing is as it seems at first glance. “For me, the world around me is a series of fragile and ever-changing shapes, shadows and boundaries,” says Simon. And in his paintings everything is truly illusory and interconnected. Boundaries are blurred, and stories flow into each other.

Love drama by Joseph Lorasso

An Italian by birth, contemporary American artist Joseph Lorusso transfers onto canvas subjects he observed in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Hugs and kisses, passionate outbursts, moments of tenderness and desire fill his emotional pictures.

Country life of Dmitry Levin

Dmitry Levin is a recognized master of Russian landscape, who has established himself as a talented representative of the Russian realistic school. The most important source of his art is his attachment to nature, which he loves tenderly and passionately and of which he feels himself a part.

Bright East by Valery Blokhin