The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (331 page)

Myron
.

Greek sculptor active in Athens in the mid 5th cent. BC. He was one of the leading Greek sculptors of the period and is now remembered mainly for his bronze
Discobolus
(Discus Thrower), which survives in Roman marble copies; the best of them is in the Terme Museum in Rome. As an example of compositional equilibrium it achieved a fame comparable to the
Doryphorus
of
Polyclitus
. Copies also exist of Myron's group of
Athena and Marsyas
, but no visual record survives of the work for which he was most renowned in his own time—the bronze
Cow
in the market place at Athens, which was said to display remarkable naturalism. See also
SEVERE STYLE
.

 
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(
c.
1590–1647).
Anglo-Dutch portrait painter. He was born in Delft and trained in The Hague (probably under
Mierevelt
), but almost all of his known career was spent in England, where he is first recorded in 1618 working for the Earl of
Arundel
. By 1620 he was working for James I and in 1625 he was appointed ‘one of our Picture Drawers’ by Charles I. Mytens introduced a new elegance and grandeur into English portraiture, especially in his full-lengths, and he was the dominant painter at court until the arrival of van
Dyck
in 1632. Van Dyck completely outclassed him, however, and he returned to The Hague in about 1634. Few paintings are known from his final years, but he continued to work as Arundel's agent. His finest picture is acknowledged to be
The First Duke of Hamilton
(Scottish NPG, Edinburgh, 1629), described by Sir Ellis
Waterhouse
as ‘the great masterpiece of pre-Vandyckian portraiture in England’. Mytens was one of a dynasty of painters active into the 18th cent. Among the other members was his great-nephew,
Daniel Mytens the Younger
(1644–88), also a portraitist.

 
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Nabis
.

Group of French painters, active in Paris in the 1890s, whose work was inspired by
Gauguin's
expressive use of colour and rhythmic pattern. The name ‘Nabis’ was coined by the poet Henri Cazalis from a Hebrew word meaning ‘prophets’ because of their half-serious, half-burlesque pose as adepts and their attitude to the new Gauguin style as a kind of religious illumination.
Sérusier
, who met Gauguin at
Pont Aven
in 1888, provided the initiative for the group and with
Denis
was its main theorist. The other members of the group included
Bonnard
,
Vuillard
, and Vuillard's brother-in-law, Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867–1944). Their activities included theatre, poster and stained-glass design, and book illustration as well as painting. The first Nabis exhibition was held in 1892. After a successful exhibition held in 1899 together with certain of the
Symbolists
in the gallery of the dealer
Durand-Ruel
, the members of the group gradually drifted apart.

 
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(1882–1946).
Polish-born sculptor who became an American citizen in 1927. After brief studies in his native Warsaw and in Munich he settled in Paris in 1903 or 1904 and lived there until 1914. With the outbreak of the First World War, Nadelman moved to London and then New York. He had a successful one-man show at
Stieglitz's
gallery in 1915 and was befriended by Paul
Manship
and Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney
among others. His patrons included Helena Rubinstein (he had known her in Paris) who commissioned him to make sleek marble heads for her beauty salons. He married a wealthy widow in 1919 and his work has a witty sophistication appropriate to the high society world he moved in, as with the delightful bowler-hatted
Man in the Open Air
(MOMA, New York, 1915). With his humour went a bold simplification and distortion of forms that places him alongside
Lachaise
as one of the pioneers of modern sculpture in America. The Depression had a disastrous effect on his market and his career virtually ended when a good deal of his work was accidentally destroyed in 1935.

 
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naïve art
.

Term applied to painting (and to a much lesser degree sculpture) produced in more or less sophisticated societies but lacking conventional expertise in representational skills. Colours are characteristically bright and non-naturalistic, perspective non-scientific, and the vision childlike or literal-minded. The term *‘
primitive
’ is sometimes used more or less synonymously with naïve, but this can be confusing, as ‘primitive’ is also applied loosely to paintings of the pre-Renaissance era as well as to art of ‘uncivilized’ societies. Other terms that are sometimes used in a similar way are ‘folk’, ‘popular’, or ‘Sunday painters’, but these too have their pitfalls, not least ‘Sunday painter’, for many amateurs do not paint in a naïve style, and naïve artists (at least the successful ones) often paint as a full-time job. Sophisticated artists may also deliberately effect a naïve style, but this ‘false naïvety’ (
faux naïf
) is no more to be confused with the spontaneous quality of the true naïve than the deliberately childlike work of say
Klee
or
Picasso
is to be confused with genuine children's drawing. Naïve art has a quality of its own that is easy to recognize but hard to define. Scottie
Wilson
summed it up when he said ‘It's a feeling you cannot explain. You’re born with it and it just comes out.’
Henri
Rousseau
was the first naïve painter to win serious critical recognition and he remains the only one who is regarded as a great master, but many others have won an honourable place in modern art. The critic Wilhelm
Uhde
was mainly responsible for putting naïve painters on the map in the years after the First World War. At first their freshness and directness of vision appealed mainly to fellow artists, but a number of major group exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s helped to develop public taste for them, notably ‘Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1938. Most of the early naïve painters to make reputations were French (mainly because Uhde was active in discovering and promoting them in France); they included
Bauchant
,
Bombois
,
Séraphine
, and
Vivin
. In Britain the best-known figures include Beryl
Cook
and Henry
Wallis
(two painters who show the huge difference of approach and style that can exist between artists given the same label). L. S.
Lowry
is also often claimed as a naïve painter, but some critics regard him as outside this classification because of his many years of study at art school. In the USA the leading figures include John
Kane
and Grandma
Moses
. The richest crop of naïve painters, however, has been in Croatia, where Ivan
Generalic
has been the most famous figure.