We all love stories about old men and women who adorn their cottages with the gold of village baroque, turn plain country houses into galleries of the lubok and, with no artistic training whatever, paint vast canvases on themes…

We all love stories about old men and women who adorn their cottages with the gold of village baroque, turn plain country houses into galleries of the lubok and, with no artistic training whatever, paint vast canvases on themes of simple Russian life. These artistic phenomena are usually classed as naive art, which can be seen not in every museum, but which invariably wins the hearts of viewers with its spontaneity and simplicity. One has only to glance at the work of, say, Albert Korovkin, Nina Varfolomeyeva or Alevtina Pyzhova to receive one's daily allowance of charm.

From 27 July to 24 September the Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum is holding the exhibition “Oh, How Naive You Are!”, which shows the history of naive art in Russia from the nineteenth century to the present day. The display is very colourful, with more than 150 works by 45 artists, covering contemporary and early anonymous naive art, naive ethnography, copy painting and the Soviet aesthetic of amateur creativity, the native classics of naive art and naive impressionism.

In 2015 Yekaterinburg was given a private collection of naive art, and the collection proved so coherent and rich that it grew into a full-fledged city Museum of Naive Art. In the few years of its existence the museum's holdings have grown considerably and now number thousands of works, but the museum itself is rather small, so it is not easy for it to show its own collection on a grand scale. Nizhny Novgorod has therefore offered the halls of its principal art museum and added naive art from its own holdings to the Yekaterinburg collection.