Lot 92: Lia Mittarakis (1934-1998)

Lia Mittarakis (1934-1998)
Rio de Janeiro
signed, inscribed and dated 'Lia Mittarakis I. Paquetá 1982' (lower left)
oil on canvas
27½ x 37in. (70 x 94cm.)
Painted in 1982

Naïve Art
''All that he encountered in the world is present''
-Anatole Jakovsky on Camille Bombois
Naïve Art and its appreciation are very much a 20th Century phenomenon: beginning with the first exhibition of Henri 'Le Douanier' Rousseau's works organized by the critic Wilhelm Uhde in 1909 (just one year before the artist's death) and culminating in a series of great exhibitions and publications such as Otto Bihalji-Merin's World Encyclopedia of Naïve Art: A Hundred Years of Naïve Art (London, 1984) and MoMA's 1937 show Masters of Popular Painting, Modern Primitives of Europe and America (New York, 1937). Although Rousseau is undoubtedly the most celebrated Naïve artist, it is not a movement as such, but a grouping of artists whose work shares a common quality and we are proud to present a group of works that exemplify both the broadness and unity of sentiment that define this genre.
''These artists have no academic training. They work partly without any type of technical notion. They come from all social classes and from the most disparate activities. Entirely influenced by artistic traditions they deal with their life experiences and paint pictures of desires, dreams and memories. The themes regard for the most part childhood, religion and myths, the homeland and the surrounding environment, the world of work, festivals, but political and historical issues, social problems and the world of utopias as well. Naïve artists are personalities whose style is original, unmistakable and independent.''
-C. Zander, 'Considerations on Naïve Art', exhib. cat. Da Rousseau a Ligabue: Naïf?, Turin, Palazzo Bricherasio, 6 September - 24 November 2002
The birth of Naïve Art as a notion took place in the first years of the 20th Century, in Paris. An early supporter of Cubism, Uhde was fascinated by the 'truth' of Rousseau's unschooled hand, and he went on to discover a number of artists in whom he recognized the same beauty. This group became known as the Sacré-Coeur painters (after the Montmartre streets that they often painted, and, later Uhde claimed, after the purity of their souls). This collective included artists like Henri Rousseau, Camille Bombois (lot 97), André Bauchant (lot 95), Louis Vivin and Séraphine. As artists like Picasso, Léger and Breton celebrated the work of the Naïve masters, writers and critics began to take notice and the first real appreciation and study of this area began to take place around the world.
France, the Balkans states, Haiti and South America have all come to be recognized as great centres of Naïve Art, but it remains a scattered collective - not even a collective but a numbering of individuals, each one unique in their vision. This vision has had a profound effect on Modern Art and its masters - without the influence of Naïve Art the works of Picasso, Matisse, Dufy and Miró would have been very different. It was as if these artists knew that the Naïfs saw the world in a full and true way, uncompromised by knowledge and cynicism: as the artist Oskar Schlemmer said of Rousseau's work, ''almost all modern art compared to this is a fragment''.
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