Ivan Rabuzin


Ivan Rabuzin was a Croatian naïve artist. French art critic Anatole Jakovsky described him in 1972 as "one of the greatest naïve painters of all times and countries".
Rabuzin's father was a miner, and Ivan was the sixth of his eleven children. Ivan worked as a carpenter for many years, and did not begin painting until 1956, when he was thirty-five years old. He had little formal training as an artist, but his first exhibition of paintings proved successful and he changed careers, becoming a professional painter in 1962.
Rabuzin's paintings included Avenue and My Homeland. He was active in politics as a member of Croatian Democratic Union, and from 1993 to 1999 he was also a member of the Croatian Parliament. He took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Rabuzin decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.
Rabuzin stopped painting in 2002 due to an illness. He died on 18 December 2008 in a hospital in Varaždin, Croatia.