Fiddledeedee

Naïve Art is a very particular part of Croatian 20th century art. We are talking at first about the work of peasants and working men, craftsmen and shopkeepers, clerks and retirees, ordinary people from the folk (hence the name of folk art that it once had). But the most successful artists in time turned professionals, which is a very particular feature of the Croatian Naïve.
A great role in the endorsement of naïve art was played by the phenomenon of the Hlebine School of painters, who came from the village of the same name in Podravina, the Drava valley. The origins of this school were favoured by the spread of populist ideas in Croatia, which encouraged ruralism and the peasant literary and overall cultural movement.

Krsto Hegedušić (Petrinja, 1901 – Zagreb, 1975) started working in 1930 with the Hlebine peasants; in this period between the wars, the works of the school were much under his influence; the demand for social themes was everywhere, and social contrasts and the harsh everyday life were common motifs. Hegedušić was secretary of the artists’ association Zemlja (founded 1929; it had a leftish social orientation and a very figurative form of expression) to the exhibition of which in Zagreb in 1931 he invited peasant-painters from Hlebine Ivan Generalić (Hlebine, 1914 - Koprivnica, 1992) and Franjo Mraz.