In the 1930s a group of self-taught painters from the village of Hlebine in northern Croatia — Ivan Generalić most famous among them — began producing astonishing paintings on glass and canvas, depicting peasant life with technical precision and dreamlike colour. The movement they founded, the Hlebine School, became one of the few internationally recognised contributions of Croatian art in the 20th century.
This small museum, in a Baroque palace at the top of Ćirilometodska Street, is the definitive collection: 80 or so works from the major naïve painters across multiple generations. The paintings are unexpectedly powerful — funny, melancholic, sometimes terrifying — and entirely unlike anything else. Allow an hour. Combine with the Museum of Broken Relationships across the street.