The Croatian Museum of Naive Art

(Hrvatski Muzej Naivne Umjetnosti)

The Croatian Museum of Naive Art (Hrvatski Muzej Naivne Umjetnosti) - This is the first museum dedicated to this type of art in the world. It was founded in 1952, after the first generation of Croatian naive artists established themselves and began to achieve significant success. The Naive is a concept just like the concepts of Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Abstractionism, and the Surreal and so on that we use to interrelate some of the separate worlds of modern artistic creativity.

The museum was founded under the name Peasant Art Gallery, with the aim of collecting, studying and exhibiting the works of "peasant painters", or "peasant sculptors", as naive artists were called at the time.

As the need soon arose for the collection and study of works by artists belonging to the working class, in 1956 the institution changed its name to the Gallery of Primitive Art. The term "primitive" has gradually, in an effort to avoid pejorative connotations, in theory and criticism increasingly replaced by the term "naive" and since 1994 the museum operates under the name Croatian Museum of Naive Art. The Croatian Museum of Naive Art has more than 1,900 works of art in its holdings. The collection includes the most numerous works by Croatian artists, but the Museum also has a respectable collection of works by foreign authors.