Naive Art

Although the painter Henri Rousseau, a French toll collector, was discovered by Picasso and his circle in the early years of the 20th century, the first sustained interest in self-taught artists developed between World War I and World War II. These artists (also called naives, primitives or folk artists) for the most part did conventional easel painting, depicting recognizable subjects (landscapes, still lifes, portraits) in their surroundings.

We have chosen to group the artists handled by the Galerie St. Etienne according to when they were first discovered. For the most part, artists promoted in the first half of the 20th century tend to fall into the "naive" camp, while those discovered in the past half century fall more readily in to the "Art Brut" or "outsider" category. Artists such as William Edmondson or Bill Traylor, though active before World War II, were not fully appreciated until relatively recently, are generally classified as "outsider" or "Art Brut" artists.

However, as a practical matter it should be noted that the distinctions between "naive" and "Art Brut" go only so far. Even in Europe (where the categories are more distinct than in the U.S.) there are artists such as Nikifor and Wittlich (both considered "naives") who blur the lines. In the U.S., the distinctions between "naive" and "outsider" really have much more to do with when the artists were "discovered" than they do with any clear-cut stylistic boundaries. For this reason, many scholars prefer the modern designation "self-taught" to the more confusing (and often inadequate) adjectives "naive," "outsider," and "art brut."