Mondes Parallèles: MAMAC’s Unexpected Dialogue With Masters of Naïve Art

The current exhibition at Nice’s Musée d’art naïf Anatole Jakovsky is a stroke of genius that proves how opposites attract and different art forms can complement each other.

Henri Rousseau never attended art school. Neither did Niki de Saint Phalle. One painted jungles he had never seen with the obsessive detail of a customs officer who spent his Sundays at the Jardin des Plantes. The other shot at plaster reliefs with a rifle, letting chance and explosive pigment determine the final work. The academy would have called Rousseau primitive. It celebrated Saint Phalle as contemporary. Stand before their works, and the distinction dissolves into something much more interesting than classification.

Mondes Parallèles, running at the Musée International d’Art Naïf Anatole Jakovsky through March 2026, makes productive use of an inconvenience. When MAMAC, the Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, closed in January 2024 for extensive renovation as part of Nice’s Promenade du Paillon expansion project, it decided not to mothball its collection during the multi-year closure, but share its treasures across continents and institutions. Niki de Saint Phalle’s monumental works traveled to Kansas City in 2024 before continuing to Belo Horizonte. Fernand Léger paintings found their way to the Musée Léger in Biot. And now select pieces from MAMAC’s collection have arrived at the Musée d’Arts Naïfs Anatole Jakovsky, where contemporary art has met naïf for a surprising love match. 

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Twenty-six works by eighteen international artists now occupy these galleries. Paintings converse with photographs, sculptures with collages. The selection crosses the usual boundaries, arranged around thematic and formal resonances rather than chronological or stylistic logic. Among the featured artists are Karel Appel, Christian Boltanski, Gaston Chaissac, Serge Dorigny, Ivan  Generalić, Dorothy Iannone, Lars Fredrikson, Karen, Eva Lallement, Simone Le Carré-Galimard, Greta Pĕcnik, Marilena Pelosi, Zofia Rostad, Niki de Saint Phalle, Dorothée Selz and Antoni Miralda, Séraphine de Senlis, and an anonymous painter.

Each artist in Mondes Parallèles creates a distinct universe with its own galaxies and constellations. As the exhibition title suggests, these run alongside one another, occasionally tangent, sometimes overlapping. For the duration of MAMAC’s exile to the museum of naïve art, visitors can observe these intersections directly and discover that boundaries between artistic worlds prove more permeable than labels suggest. Works by both Saint Phalle and Chaissac actually appear in both collections, embodying the exhibition’s argument about fluid boundaries.

Styles such as contemporary, naïve, raw, singular or popular art typically evolve in opposite spheres and rarely share the same room. The premise of this exhibition therefore carries intellectual weight but without the academic fussiness. What actually distinguishes naïve art from contemporary practice? Where does art brut end and singular art begin? The exhibition poses these questions directly, then acknowledges that answers remain fluid, subject to perpetual revision.

Naïve art gained recognition when Rousseau exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, though critics initially treated him as a curiosity. The term suggests autodidactic practice, bright palettes, meticulous attention to detail, and subjects drawn from folklore and imagination. A certain dark poetry often haunts these scenes, lending them unexpected power.

Art brut arrived as a concept through Hans Prinzhorn in 1922 and Jean Dubuffet in 1945. Dubuffet described work by creators outside professional artistic circles who work impulsively, often on unconventional materials, answering an internal necessity rather than market demands.

Singular art emerged in the 1970s when collector Alain Bourbonnais opened the Atelier Jacob after meeting Dubuffet. The 1978 exhibition Les Singuliers de l’Art at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris gathered artists whose work grew from lived experience of illness, disability, and marginality. They challenged establishment taste through spontaneous production that refused bourgeois decorum.

Contemporary art groups work by formally trained artists produced roughly since 1945, though temporal coincidence does not guarantee membership. Originality, historical consciousness, and institutional recognition factor into the designation. The definition remains contested.

The exhibition acknowledges that these classifications, however useful for museum organization, obscure more than they reveal. Artistic practice thrives on porosity and genres bleed into one another. Influence flows in unexpected directions and interactions, borrowings, and chance encounters generate creation.

The Jakovsky Museum occupies the Château Sainte Hélène in the Fabron quarter, a former prestige property acquired by Nice in the late 1970s. The institution exists because critic and collector Anatole Jakovsky and his wife Renée donated their collection to the city. That gift has grown into nearly 3,000 items spanning naïve art from the eighteenth century to the present, with expanding holdings in art brut and singular art, positioning Nice as a center for understanding naïve art worldwide. 

The show runs through 31 March. Meanwhile, MAMAC remains closed, its collection in productive exile across the region and beyond. The renovation continues. The Coulée Verte takes shape. And naïve art and contemporary practice suddenly share the same walls, discovering what they have been saying to each other all along.

Visitor Information

Mondes Parallèles at Musée International d’Art Naïf Anatole Jakovsky
Running until 31st March, 2026

Open daily from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 1:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. except Tuesday

Admission €5, concessions available, free for under 18

Online booking https://billetterie-museesnice.tickeasy.com/en-GB/museum

CONTACT DETAILS

Musée International d’Art Naïf Anatole Jakovsky
23 Av. de Fabron
06200 Nice

Tel: +33 4 93 71 78 33

All images courtesy Ville de Nice; lead image © Julien Véran, Ville de Nice; all other photos as credited

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