Naive school of painting drew on reality

The Jiushi Art Museum in Shanghai is hosting The Naif Art China Debut: The Wonderful World of the Naif Painters, which features 55 paintings by nine artists — Henri Rousseau, Seraphine Louis, Andre Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Dominique Peyronnet, Louis Vivin, Rene Rimbert, Jean Eve and Ferdinand Desnos.

Naif, or naive, art refers to works of fine art created by a self-taught artist.

This is the fourth exhibition under the Western Masters series following Edvard Munch, Marc Chagall and Giorgio Morandi. Since its founding, the museum has presented a summer exhibition from this series every year so that audiences of all ages, especially children, can learn about an important master, or in this case, a school in Western art, says Ma Zhenzheng, a cocurator of the exhibition.

According to Alex Susanna, a Spanish poet, critic and co-curator of the exhibition, the naive painters are "among the best kept secrets of modern art", because they were mostly neglected during their life-time, when they were unjustly labeled as "amateur", "sloppy", "childish" or "incomprehensible".

Even today, many of these artists are still largely unknown to the public, except possibly for Rousseau, whose large paintings of jungle scenes are widely admired in major museums around the world.

None of the nine artists received formal art training and they all had different professions. Rousseau, for example, was a customs officer. Bauchant was a gardener; Bombois was a wrestler and strongman in a traveling circus; and Louis, the only female artist among them, used to be a maid.