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Zagreb
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 About fifty metres north of Katarinin trg, the Gallery of Naive Art (Galerija naivne umjetnosti; Tues–Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun 10am–fpm; www.hmnu.org) at Cirilometodska 3 provides an excellent introduction to the work of Croatia's village painters.
The development of a school of painting inspired by peasant craft traditions was largely the work of an academically trained outsider, Krsto Hegedušić, who had been impressed by the work of untutored painters like "Le Douanier" Rousseau while studying in Paris. Visiting family in the Slavonian village of Hlebine in the 1930s, Hegedušić discovered that the paintings of local lads Ivan Generalić and Franjo Mraz displayed much of the style and verve he had seen in the work of other European non-academic artists, and took them under his wing, encouraging them to exhibit more widely. The work of Generali6 dominates the first of the gallery's six rooms, with his early watercolours of Croatian village life reflecting a Brueghelesque fascination with rural festivities. His pictures soon developed a more fairy-tale, symbolic style, however – his numerous pictures of stags in forests resemble the illustrations in medieval manuscripts. Subsequent rooms deal with later generations of naive painters from across Croatia, with highlights including Ivan Lacković-Croata's scenes of villages in winter, crowded with spindly, stylized trees and snow-laden houses; Emerik Fejeg's kaleidoscopic cityscapes; and Ivan Rabuzin's meditative, almost abstract visions of rural harmony.The final room concentrates on Josip Generalić (son of Ivan), who painted like a comic-strip artist on acid, deserting rural themes in favour of subjects like war, actresses, and the mass suicides of cult members. His 1973 portrait of Sophia Loren is one of the most garish in the collection (note the ugly cat, which allegedly represents Loren's husband, Carlo Ponti).
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