Croatian Museum of Naive Art

Naive art is one of the few things twentieth-century Croatia genuinely exported to the wider art world, and this small gallery in the Upper Town is where to see it. It grew out of the Hlebine school, a group of self-taught village painters in the Drava plain of Podravina who began working in the 1930s, most famously Ivan Generalić. Many of them painted on glass from behind, so the picture is built in reverse and comes out flat, bright and hard-edged. The subjects are village work, weddings, funerals, snow, roosters and mud. Later and considerably darker painters, and some sculpture, are in the collection too.

History

The museum was founded in Zagreb on 1 November 1952 as the Peasant Art Gallery; by 1956 it had become the Gallery of Primitive Art, part of the city galleries that are today the Museum of Contemporary Art, and since 1994, by decision of the Croatian Parliament, it has carried its present name. Run from the start on strict museum principles, it is regarded as the world's first museum of naive art. Its holdings have grown to more than 1,900 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, mostly by Croatian artists, shown on the first floor of the 18th-century Raffay Palace in the Upper Town; since 1997 it has run a growing education programme, aimed at schools since 2002 (Wikipedia, Croatian Museum of Naïve Art).

What you'll find

• Generalić's glass paintings - reverse-painted village scenes and winter figures, the core of the collection.
• The Hlebine school - the Podravina village painters who started the movement in the 1930s.
• Later painters - artists such as Ivan Rabuzin and Emerik Feješ working in very different registers.
• The technique - an explanation of painting in reverse on the back of glass, which changes how it all reads.

When to go

Year-round and indoors, which makes it useful in bad weather. It is small enough to fit around the funicular and St Mark's on an Upper Town morning. Weekday mornings are close to empty. Like most Zagreb museums it closes on Mondays and keeps shorter hours on Sundays.

Things to know

It is genuinely small, a handful of rooms, and an hour is generous. The ticket is cheap but the collection is narrow, and if the flat bright style does not appeal in the first room it will not improve in the next. Rotations mean a specific painting you have read about may not be hanging. There is no café and the shop is a counter.

Nearby

St Mark's church and the Upper Town streets are outside the door, and Dolac market is below.

Key facts