'Left Field' is a memoir with many meadows, one of them containing the flowers and
fields of the Croatian naïve painter Ivan Rabuzin. Some years ago as his London agent, I
produced a BBC Arena film made during the wars in the former
Yugoslavia. With Rabuzin's paintings came a homespun philosophy: ‘When a
man looks at something, he just sees half of it. At every moment,
half the world is missing to us so we must turn in order to see the
second half. Everything depends on what we see and how long we see
it. That’s how long we live. Unfortunately, for most of us, even
when we are alive, we live only half a life.’ Despite selling
truckloads of his silk-screen prints in Japan and with buyers like
Woody Allen, it proved impossible to popularise his work in the UK. Croatia: The Artists' War was panned by the critics here. Giles
Smith in The Independent said, ‘Most
of his paintings look like the kind of Get Well card you might buy for someone you didn’t
know that closely.’ Check Rabuzin's art out for yourself here. He liked to play Chopin when he worked though this video is set to Handel.
Naïve
artists work without formal technical qualifications and with a
remarkable indifference to perspective. Uninfluenced by art
traditions, they paint pictures mirroring their memories, desires and
dreams. When most people think of naïve art, the names that come to
mind are Henri Rousseau and Grandma Moses, but southeast Europe has
produced many of these painters. Among the best known, the peasant, Ivan Generalić; the
postman, Ivan Lacković and the carpenter, Ivan Rabuzin. Rabuzin's buyers included Yul Brynner and Woody
Allen - you can see one in Annie
Hall. His pastel-coloured silk screen prints sold well in the Far
East and he was known in Germany, France, Italy and Japan, but his
reputation had never been established in Britain. My job was to find
a London gallery which would represent him … There
were only two possibilities, the
Portal Gallery, who represented Beryl Cook, and the Rona Gallery. The
Portal weren't
interested, but the Rona was. A
regular visitor there
was Mervyn Levy: writer, artist and art critic who’d been a
childhood friend of Dylan Thomas. Mervyn was a small, dapper man with
a moustache and neatly-clipped white beard. We planned to write a
play together about Dylan, based on Mervyn’s memories, and he would
invite me to the Chelsea Arts Club to discuss our project. We never
got far after the first bottle of wine. Read more about my years in the art world at Left Field.
Pic. Ivan Rabuzin
