KOVACICA, Serbia — Nearly a century ago, two farmers in an ethnic Slovak village in northern Serbia started painting to pass the time during the long winter months. This week, their art is being inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list.
The farmers’ paintings and those of others from the village of Kovacica are what is known as naïve art — a form that depicts everyday scenes, landscapes, village life and farm surroundings with a childlike simplicity.
With their bright colors and folk motives, the self-taught naïve painters of Kovacica, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, have developed a unique tradition among the country’s ethnic Slovak minority.
“Naïve art in Kovacica began in 1939 when Martin Paluska and Jan Sokol started painting,” explained Ana Zolnaj Barca, the head of the Gallery of Naïve Art in the village. “They were farmers with only four grades of elementary school.”
Paluska and Sokol initially painted scenes they saw on postcards, such as Venetian gondolas or wild animals, explained Zolnaj Barca. But their art really bloomed over time, when they turned to their own surroundings rather than far-away lands, she said.
The village’s naïve art gallery, established in 1955, now holds the works of nearly 50 recognized artists and hosts some 20,000 visitors each year.
Among its most famous artists is Zuzana Chalupova, who often painted children and whose work was featured on millions of UNICEF postcards. Another Kovacica artist, Martin Jonas, depicted farmers with oversized hands and feet but small heads — meant to symbolize their hard-working life.
And though the Kovacica style of naïve paintings originated in the village, it has since spread far beyond the area.
“An identifying factor, the practice is a means of transmitting the cultural heritage and history of the Slovak community in Serbia,” UNESCO said in its citation.
Serbia’s government said Tuesday that the UNESCO decision to inscribe Kovacica’s naïve paintings confirms the Balkan nation’s “promotion of cultural diversity.”
For gallerist and expert Pavel Babka, naïve art represents a treasure chest of traditional ways and customs — he points to a painting in his gallery showing a girl in traditional Slovak multi-layered skirt being sent off to church alone for the first time.
Another painting in Babka’s gallery features a horse-drawn cart and a yellow house dating back to Austro-Hungarian times, testifying of the long presence of the ethnic Slovak community in what is today Serbia.
Contemporary naïve artists, Babka said, often also seek inspiration in the tales of the past and “would rather paint a horse than a tractor.”
Artist Stefan Varga, 65, agrees. He said he paints images based on the “stories my grandmother told me from when she was a little girl.”
Those times weren’t easy but they were “simple and beautiful,” he said.
Varga’s paintings feature cheerful, red-cheeked villagers in traditional clothes, bright colors, farm animals and huge pumpkins. The main characteristics of naïve painting are “joy and purity, the purity of heart and colors,” he said.
“Naïve painters usually use simple colors,” said Varga. They “use the simplest way to say what they want to say so everybody can understand them, whether they are Chinese, Japanese, English or Serb.”
