Die Maler des Heiligen Herzens / The Painters of the Sacred Heart

Paintings of a Sensual Immediacy

As artists, they were self-taught and created a cosmos of images that still captivates us today with its sensual immediacy and has made a lasting mark in art history on the work of non-academically trained artists: Henri Rousseau (1844 1910), Camille Bombois (1883 1970), André Bauchant (1873 1958), Louis Vivin (1861 1939) and Séraphine Louis (1864 1942). They are counted among the so-called circle of the "painters of the sacred heart"; their scenarios, often borrowed from nature, especially flowers and fruits, but also people in parks and landscapes, indicate a closeness to nature, a sensitive approach to the things of the immediate environment, with which they apparently sought to escape the coldness of uprising modernism.

These French pioneers of authentic art were discovered by the German art historian Wilhelm Uhde (1874 1947), who organized their first joint exhibition in Paris in 1928.