With the term naïve art, we mainly define the status of an artist who is not academically educated, but rather self-taught – that’s why in Slovenian we like to define him as a self-made artist.
In the 20th century, the phenomenon of naïve art was especially prominent in Yugoslavia before the Second World War. The Croatian academic painter Krsto Hegedušić (1901–1975), who led the Zemlja group, founded the “Hlebin School” in 1930 in the Zagorje village of Hlebine. The name took hold in 1931, when Hegedušić invited two of its representatives, Ivan Generalić (1914–1992) and Franjo Mraz (1901–1975), to an exhibition of the Zemlja group in Zagreb.
Hegedušić, who used the tempera painting technique on glass, attracted peasant youths with his characteristic simplified stylization and directed them to painting, as he wanted art to find contact with the common people. The phenomenon of peasant painters, or the Hlebin school, was written on the skin of the socialist regime, which tried to affirm the ideology that art is not the domain of elites, but belongs to everyone and is also easy to understand by everyone. Even people from the periphery without general or formal art education can engage in it, and even achieve international fame. After 1945, naïve art became a popular Yugoslav trademark – a recognizable sign of Yugoslav art in the world.
Hegedušić, who used the tempera painting technique on glass, attracted peasant youths with his characteristic simplified stylization and directed them to painting, as he wanted art to find contact with the common people. The phenomenon of peasant painters, or the Hlebin school, was written on the skin of the socialist regime, which tried to affirm the ideology that art is not the domain of elites, but belongs to everyone and is also easy to understand by everyone. Even people from the periphery without general or formal art education can engage in it, and even achieve international fame. After 1945, naïve art became a popular Yugoslav trademark, so to speak, a recognizable sign of Yugoslav art in the world.
After World War II, Ivan Generalić, the most prominent representative of the Hlebin school, became a kind of painting guru and taught painting to the younger generations in Podravina (the so-called second generation): Franjo Filipović, Dragutin Gaži, Mijo Kovačić, Ivan Večenaj, Martin Mehkek, Ivan Lacković-Croata ).
Because of such great interest in naive artists, it was desirable that each republic discover its own representatives of this artistic direction. Thus, the Slovenian Žiri became one of the four Yugoslav republican centers of this art.
In 1955, at the III. At the Biennale in São Paulo, Yugoslav art was represented by Naiva, which gave this type of art worldwide fame. Particularly important is the exhibition in 1958, “50 Ans d’Art Moderne” in Brussels, where Ivan Generalić is ranked among the world’s most important painters of the second half of the 20th century.