»Naive« Art

The amateur art of miners flourished in the Ruhr region in the 1950s. A key aspect of the trade union's educational work, and thus also of the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, which was founded in 1947, was to provide ideas on how to fill one's time off work - hard-won over many years - in a meaningful way. During this time, Thomas Grochowiak, director of the museums in Recklinghausen, and his later successor Anneliese Schröder, as jurors of so-called "hobby-horse tournaments" and in exhibitions in pay halls throughout the Ruhr region, came across artistic talents "between hobby art and amateur painting" who "without training, instinctively and intuitively, had their own, unconscious and unchangeable way of representation and expression from the very beginning "¹. They discovered and supported "naive" artists such as Erich Bödeker, Max Valerius, Franz Klekawka, Karl Hertmann, Franz Brandes and the brothers Friedrich and Ludwig Gerlach. All former coal and steel workers or miners who had become ill from their hard work and found a new purpose in life in art, which they pursued with passion. With exhibitions such as "Arbeit - Freizeit - Muße" (1953), which presented works by "naive" artists alongside masterpieces of Romanticism and European Modernism, "Sinnvolles Laienschaffen" (1954) and "Laienkunst im Ruhrgebiet" (1963), the Ruhr Festival and Kunsthalle Recklinghausen became a center of "naive" art in Germany and a meeting place for amateur artists in the region. To this day, "naive" art, especially that of the Ruhr region, is one of the focal points of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen's collection.                        

¹ Thomas Grochowiak