The Musée Maillol is home to over a hundred works from the vibrant, dreamy, original and inexhaustible world of so-called “naïve” or “folk” artists, also referred to as self taught artists . Called “modern primitives” by one of their most fervent supporters, the collector and art critic Wilhelm Uhde (1874-1947), these artists reinvented painting in their own distinctive style, breaking away from that of academism and the avant-garde. Brought together for the first time in Paris, their colorful works reveal an often neglected element of the history of inter-war art.

Following the works of Henri Rousseau and Séraphine Louis, the exhibition presents a selection of artists including André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Ferdinand Desnos, Jean Ève, René Rimbert, Dominique Peyronnet and Louis Vivin.

Self-taught, like the “Douanier” Rousseau who preceded them, these artists came to the field of painting in secret, or late in life, driven by thwarted calling, a divine injunction, or by history. Out of necessity, they balanced their artistic practice with an often modest profession: roadmender, domestic employee, fairground wrestler, printer, or postal worker. Although they did not know each other, some exhibited at the Salons, while others were seen and supported by influential art lovers. Among the latter were André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Vassily Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Henri-Pierre Roché, Maximilien Gauthier, Wilhelm Uhde, Jeanne Bucher, Anatole Jakovsky and Dina Vierny, founder of the Musée Maillol.

Born into a Jewish family from Bessarabia that emigrated to France in the 1920s, Dina Vierny was a model for Maillol and Matisse as well as a member of the Resistance from the start of the war. She discovered André Bauchant’s paintings at Jeanne Bucher’s gallery during the Occupation. Encouraged by the gallery owner, the muse opened her own gallery in 1947, and later created the Fondation Dina Vierny – Musée Maillol in 1995. There she exhibited artists that she found personally interesting, including Vassily Kandinsky, Serge Poliakoff and Bauchant himself.

After the war a new acquaintance played a decisive role in her career path; Anne-Marie Uhde, who donated her late brother Wilhelm’s art collection to Dina Vierny. Through the organization of his two legendary exhibitions “Les Peintres du Coeur-Sacré” in 1928 and “Les Primitifs modernes” in 1932, Wilhelm Uhde brought together artists who had previously been ignored together in an exhibition space for the first time. In the postwar period, Dina Vierny was one of the few, along with Anatole Jakovsky, to continue the work of this pioneering collector; the exhibition “Le Monde merveilleux des naïfs” translated as “the marvelous world of the naïeve(s)”, presented at the gallery in 1974, bears witness to this. Nearly fifty years later, the Musée Maillol pays tribute to these artists and to those who championed them.

Rousseau, Bauchant, Bombois, Desnos, Ève, Louis, Rimbert, Peyronnet and Vivin share a dazzling vision and an explosive lyricism. Although they could be described as realists, their works show disjointed spaces, disturbing scenes, and obsessive images where the detail often takes on an extravagant, even surreal dimension. Like the primitive painters of the pre-Renaissance period, the artists place their figures in multi-layered spaces without strictly applying the rules of perspective. And, in contrast to the avant-garde, they perpetuate a certain, sometimes humorous, pictorial tradition, by devoting themselves primarily to genre painting: still lifes, domestic scenes, landscapes and portraits of their loved ones.

The exhibition takes a thematic approach by highlighting the pictorial qualities of these artists and going beyond the simple biographies that have been most readily associated with each artist. A selection of contrasting works from major public collections (Musée d’Orsay, Musée de l’Orangerie, Musée Picasso, Centre Pompidou, LAM, Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunsthalle Hamburg) and French and international private collections, reveal the great formal inventiveness of each artist without obscuring the dialogues they engaged in with both the pictorial tradition and the art of their time.

By combining historical, analytical and emotional approaches to the works and their presentation to the world, the Musée Maillol lifts the veil on the subversive nature of so-called nïeve art, and presents these naïve, primitive, modern and anti-modern artists as great counterculture examples of the avant-garde.