Reconnu par les avant-gardes au tournant du XXe siècle pour sa rafraîchissante primitivité, encensé jusqu’aux années 1950, l’art naïf est aujourd’hui tout à fait négligé. Grâce aux expositions rares mais régulières qui lui sont consacrées, seul Henri Rousseau dit le Douanier semble encore susciter quelque intérêt. Mais les peintres révélés à sa suite, autodidactes et d’extraction populaire comme lui et répondant aux noms d’André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis, René Rimbert ou Louis Vivin, ne jouissent plus du même succès. Pourtant, leur reconnaissance durant l’entre-deux-guerres prit des dimensions insoupçonnées. «Peintres du Cœur Sacré», «Primitifs Modernes», «Maîtres Populaires de la Réalité» ou encore, outre-Atlantique, artistes folk et self-taught, ceux qui furent définitivement labellisés art naïf à partir de 1950, comptaient parmi les peintres les plus appréciés. Outre le fait de combler un chapitre encore peu investi de l’histoire de l’art et de celle du primitivisme, nous cherchons à comprendre les raisons d’un tel décalage. Notre thèse retrace et analyse ainsi la reconnaissance de l’art naïf, de son émergence avec Henri Rousseau en 1886 à son institutionnalisation par le Musée national d’art moderne français en 1948. A travers l’étude des définitions qui lui furent successivement appliquées, nous constatons que ce type de «primitifs», loin de demeurer associés aux artistes les plus avant-gardistes, fut aussi célébré par une famille artistique conservatrice et réactionnaire qui, tout en les encensant, eut certainement raison de leur postérité. / Revealed by the avant-garde at the turn of the 20th century for its refreshing primitivity, naïve art famous until the 1950’s is today completely neglected. Only Henri Rousseau known as the Douanier still draws attention thanks to the rare exhibitions that are still regularly organized on his work. But the ones who were recognized after his death, the self-taught and low-class people like him such as André Bauchant, CamilleBombois, Séraphine Louis, René Rimbert or Louis Vivin, don't ring a bell any more. However, their recognition during the in-between-wars both in France and in the United States was surprisingly successful. Known as the “Peintres du Coeur Sacré”, the “Modern Primitives”, the “Masters of Popular Paintings” or across the Atlantic as folk or self-taught artists, these painters who were definitively labeled as naïve art painters in France after 1950, were among the most appreciated ones. While completing a chapter of history of art and of the history of primitivism, we focused on trying to understand the reasons of such a shift. This PhD traces and focuses on the recognition of naïve art, from its birth with Henri Rousseau in 1886 to its institutionalization by the Musée national d’art moderne in 1948. By looking closely at the various definitions given to naïve art at different times, we can see that this type of “primitives” remains far from being associated to the most avant-gardist artists and that they were also celebrated by people from a more conservative and reactionary artistic tendency. This might have rushed their disappearance.

This dissertation considers Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) as a painter and as a figure of discourse. It addresses the longstanding concern of Rousseau’s resistance to interpretation and proposes that this derives from Rousseau’s incomplete fulfillment of the professional obligations of the artist, specifically, from his failure to motivate his work through the pursuit of what modern art critics commonly called “a problem.” Rousseau did not practice painting as artists of his day did, and because of this difference—first articulated by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1908 as an absence of artistic inquiétude—he entered the discourse of art with unprecedented susceptibility to reinvention. The Rousseau we know today, the Rousseau who was a miraculous modernist in the interwar period, and the Rousseau who emerged in the context of the avant-garde in the earliest years of the twentieth century share little besides a name, and this frustrates any effort to write a coherent history of the painter and his pictures. Rather than propose once again Rousseau’s recuperation into a traditional art-historical narrative, this dissertation tells the history of a maker who produced admirable images but fulfilled few other author-functions, and it tells the history of writers who, compensating for Rousseau’s authorial deficits, produced a new artist, a new body of work, and widespread puzzlement about the place of each in the history of modern art. / text