Faux Naïf

About

The French phrase means 'false naivety', and it describes trained artists who choose to draw and paint as if they had never learned how. The approach took hold among modernists early in the 20th century. Paul Klee kept and studied his own childhood drawings, and from the 1940s Jean Dubuffet, who championed the art of children and psychiatric patients under the name Art Brut, painted scrawled, graffiti-like figures in thick paste.

Look for wobbling lines, flattened space, skewed proportions, bright unmixed colour and figures that face straight out. The simplicity is a considered choice. In Britain Craigie Aitchison painted spare crucifixions and dogs against flat fields of colour. More recently Yoshitomo Nara has drawn big-headed, sulky children influenced by punk and comics, while Jules de Balincourt and Tal R paint loosely drawn, brightly coloured scenes. Aloïse Corbaz and Josef Hofer, by contrast, were self-taught outsider artists.