Croatian Museum of Naïve Art

 Croatia the concept of the Naive assumes the work of artists who arrived from amateurism, people who are more or less self-taught, painters and sculptors who did not obtain their education by systematic training at art schools and academies, which did not, however, prevent them from creating their own style, achieving their own level of art.

An identifiably individual style and an individual poetics that is always there pick the Naive out quite clearly from the various examples of amateurism and dilettantism, from "Sunday" and "vernacular" painters and sculptors, and from all the rest of the undifferentiated mass of the self-taught.

Since the artists of the Naive do not know how to construct a work according to the lessons of the academies, there are always certain departures in their works in proportions and perspective, and numerous "illogicalities in form and space.

A positive evaluation of such characteristics, as the expression of the free creative imagination, could come into being only after Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and the other movements and phenomena of the Modern Movement had already been experienced. This clearly shows that the Naive is also a 20th century form of expression and is in key with the modern sensibility.