Pavel Babka - the story about the village Kovačica and naive art

„We, in our village Kovačica, have also felt a lot of positive outcomes from the respect of those rules.

How is that?

Our most famous painter Zuzana Chalupova had created a painting WINTER IN KOVAČICA depicting a lot of chilrdren who are celebrating the first snow.

In 1972, UNICEF from Geneva singhed a contract with the artis herself, regarding the printing of UNICEF’s New Year greeting card, which stipulated that the author should transfer the copyrights to UNICEF.

Monika Klofner, director of the UNICEF’s greeting card department, said to me on April 5, 2004, the following: Mister Babka, the motive of Zuzana Chalupova’s Winter in Kovačica was printed in 2,000,000 copies, in 1972, and that New Year greeting card was the best-selling one in the entire world, beating all the other painters (even Picasso and Salvador Dali…..).

UNICEF earned more than 1,000,000 dollars thanks to the copyright agreement concerning that precise New Year greeting card. Those funds were used for drilling wells in Africa so the children could have a healthy drinking water.

From today’s point of view (almost 50 years have passed) it might seem to us at the first sight that Zuzana Chalupova did not receive anything?

On the contrary,

UNICEF’s New Year greeting card and regulated copyright put Zuzana Chalupova on a pedestial of world’s naïve art. In my opinion, Zuzana Chalupova was back then, and even today is the most famous naïve art female painter in the world.

Thanks to Zuzana Chalupova our village Kovačica has become the world’s naïve art metropolis, and earned a good name for the Slovak national minority from Serbia worldwide, and that is worth a lot, lot more than 1,000,000 dollars."