Nevena Martinović
THE BELGRADE PERIOD OF ĐORĐE IVAČKOVIĆ

After he had finished secondary school in 1948, Đorđe Ivačković came to Belgrade to study Architecture (he graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in 1955). A little bit more than a decade later, towards the end of 1961, he visited Paris, and the next year, 1962, he settled there for good – as a painter. Therefore, Ivačković’s painterly beginnings, by coincidence, are related to the period bordered by years very important for the artistic life of Yugoslavia, and particularly Belgrade – the year when President Tito said the fatal „no“ to Stalin, and opened the sails of the future Yugoslav voyage towards the West (1948) and the year that marked the political campaign against abstract art (1962). Between these temporal borderlines there was Belgrade from the fifties where cultural and artistic life was gradually becoming richer owing to the opening towards the western world –screenings of foreign films, concerts of international musicians, visits of artists and exhibitions organised by the most important European and world museums. The young student of architecture quite unexpectedly became a painter in this decade of the exciting arrival of global activities into Belgrade.

Before he commenced his studies Ivačković had no particular experience with fine arts and had not thought of becoming a painter. His artistic affinities were related to music, primarily piano music, since he had had classic education in that area since his childhood. Regular drawing classes at the Faculty of Architecture awakened his interest in fine art. The first signed and preserved drawings date from the period of his studies, mostly self-portraits and portraits of family members or friends, then nudes, landscapes and occasional still-lifes. Certain Ivačković’s landscapes were published as illustrations in magazines NIN and Naš vesnik (1955), in the Macedonian Horizont (1956, 1957) , Politika and Mladost (1958). All drawings were produced quickly and with easy sketching of a sure hand, as a sort of drawn notes. He meticulously preserved his drawings from the period of studies and army service, signed and chronologically classified, which proved that he was satisfied with his progress in drawing. However, later statements made by the artist and the fact that by the end of the fifties he no longer published illustrations or drew figuratively, clearly indicate that Ivačković did not take this kind of artistic creation overly seriously in relation to his studies of architecture and particularly in relations to his most important preoccupation of the moment – jazz music. The artist also talked about this in an interview with Lidija Merenik in 1989: “Until I was twenty–five, twenty–six, I had no idea I was going to be a painter (...) It emerged only after I had graduated architecture and the studies helped me to make such a decision. I liked visual arts subjects, drawing, watercolours, and the professors were excellent . Before that, I was mostly in music, I played jazz fervently, avant–garde jazz, quite a new thing in the fifties.”

Ivačković became a member of the association of jazz musicians in Belgrade as early as 1953 and played with a band where he replaced piano with an accordion and became known in the Belgrade jazz circles as “Đoka Bop”. However, while he knew everything that happened in the city in the area of music and even took part in those events, one could say that he was not particularly interested in the local art scene. There are no traces in his legacy about exhibitions of Serbian and Yugoslav art that he could have seen in the fifties in Belgrade, and he never mentioned them in his interviews. This is even more difficult to believe because the fifties were one of the most exciting and most significant decades in the development of Serbian art. Having arrived into the capital city at the moment when the political dictate over art was gradually waning, when art creativity was flourishing and exhibitions became more frequent, Ivačković could have visited some of the pivotal group and solo shows that stirred the public, which were regularly commented upon in the press and that would finally change the history of local art. He lived, studied and played music within the borderlines of central Belgrade and regularly passed by the Art Pavilion Cvijeta Zuzorić and the ULUS/ASA Gallery where exhibitions of individual artists were organised according to a tight annual schedule, also regular shows of groups of artists and associations, such as Samostalni (The Independent), Jedanaestorica (Eleven Artists), Šestorica (Six Artists), Lada, and the particularly interesting Decembarska grupa (December Group) whose members would be the pillars of support in the development of modern painting. Although there are no records that confirm Ivačković’s visits to the exhibitions of local painting, before 1957 he gathered basic knowledge about contemporary painting at exhibitions he saw in those galleries, primarily the Art Pavilion in Kalemegdan Park – but at the guest exhibitions of European and American art. The artist mentioned this in the following statement: “As a student, I visited exhibitions. [...] I was very much excited by the show of contemporary French painting organised in Cvijeta Zuzorić by Jean Cassou. There I saw great French artists such as Hartung, Soulages, Schneider, Zao Wou-Ki and their latest works. Those were unknown names for me then.”

This, somewhat surprising, fact that an artist’s most striking impressions from the annual programme of a Belgrade gallery were related to exhibitions of international art should be considered from Ivačković’s current position. First of all, he was not a student at the Academy of Fine Arts and thereby quite innocent regarding professional problems inside the Academy; he did not know the professors who were established as historic paragons, he was not burdened by the tradition he had to accept of refute, he did not know well the history of either local or international art – he was free from all the pedagogical moulds and patterns, but at the same time ignorant of the relations within the Belgrade art scene. His university classes and occasional sketching in his free time filled his leisure and obligations with small pleasures and incidental, equally small, honoraria. Another important characteristic of Ivačković’s approach to contemporary cultural and artistic happenings was the fact that, as a jazz player he considered as modern only the things that came from the world, from the west, and mostly from America, the source of jazz and permanent resource of new tendencies in that kind of music. The main guiding principle of Ivačković’s curiosity was his determined inclination to the outside world, primarily western, which he thought was the birth place of everything new and current that put in motion the spirit of an entire epoch. Therefore, he said: “With me, it [playing jazz] was probably related to my desire to communicate with the time... I always liked what was current and in” , while under “current” or “in” and “the epoch” Ivačković did not mean the happenings related to the Belgrade, or Serbian, or even Yugoslav but the global scene, with its epicentre in the West. When one takes that into account, one is not surprised that Ivačković was not so much attracted by the presentations of local artists as by the French, Italian, Dutch and particularly American ones whose exhibitions were organised in Belgrade.

He used to underline two exhibitions as turning points in his professional life – Contemporary French Art, from 1952, and Contemporary American Art, from 1956. The first show was especially important because it was Ivačković’s first encounter with certain developments in French abstract art. However, although he could see then the works by Hans Hartung, the mention of Schneider, Zao Wou-Ki and Soulages in the previously quoted statement indicates that he was equally fascinated by later exhibitions. The first two artists he could see only at the show Contemporary French Painting, from 1958, and Soulages in 1959 in the selection of works from the Urvater collection. Still, it is not so important in which selection he had encountered those artists as the fact that those were exhibitions of international art, that Ivačković was only truly fascinated as an artist with the works produced in other social and cultural circumstances and which stayed in Belgrade only accidentally and for a short period of time, but sufficiently long to make a powerful impression, leaving behind them only desire and frustration. Ivačković’s need to get to know painting better after those exhibitions could not be satisfied by the potentials of the Belgrade art scene and it was so strong that he decided to go abroad and look for what had enchanted him. He first went to Italy in 1957, and stayed for a short time; two years later he went to Germany. He was not particularly impressed by the Italian abstract painting, but he was in Munich at the time of the exhibition of contemporary American painting and after the one he had seen in Belgrade, this show left an even deeper imprint in his mind. Afterwards, Ivačković’s fundamentally ephemeral interest in the Belgrade and Serbian art context was completely severed. The artist who was at that time already preoccupied with abstract painting and impatient to find his own authentic expression, considered the local milieu as inadequate for his artistic progress.

Ivačković described his first encounter with American artists in the following way: “Yet another exhibition had a strong influence (just to make you understand how much a show can be crucial for someone’s development)... It was the exhibition of contemporary American painting. To see Kline, Kooning, Pollock in 1956, 1957... That painting was a powerful and intimate experience for me.” Ivačković commented on the next encounter with this art in Munich: “In Munich I saw the exhibition of American painting, the zenith of painting... Kline, Rothko, Pollock, Reinhardt... I was then directly confronted with a civilisation. The French and American schools were my paragons and guides, educators of my knowledge about painting.” The path from an intimate experience to the education of the mind is the formatting process of an artist that lasted during the fifties and which would in the early sixties show its results in the first authentic characteristics of the artist’s paintings. The sensations he had in front of abstract painting do not in any way relate to his modest draughtsman’s experience and even more modest knowledge of the artistic circumstances in his own country and abroad. That experience and the understanding of the painting by abstract expressionists and the painters of lyric abstractions he mentions in his statements had its source in his musical and not painterly practical knowledge. Asked if the painting of Hartung and Schneider perplexed him, Ivačković resolutely replied: “No. Everything was quite clear to me. It was an expression of motion, and it had a direct impact on me. Perhaps, it was because of music, even classical music I knew from my childhood, perhaps music had taught me to think ‘abstractly’ about relations, to deal with pure relations, and not with the ‘meaning’ in literal sense.” Had Ivačković tried to enter painting only through his artistic experience he would probably never reach the heights he did in the following decades. Judging by his early drawings, that kind of experience would follow the usual academic paths, from figuration to abstraction, as with painters who had shaped the Belgrade art scene in the fifties, and thus would never be truly free from objectness. Contrary to that, Ivačković recognised in the abstract paintings of artists such as Kline, Soulages, Pollock and Hartung the creative principle characteristic of music – the contents related to the object world around us, even if they exist, still remain within the borderlines of that abstract space (most frequently added in titles) where the creative act is performed, and where only the elements inherent to concrete art exist, the art of music or painting. In the above mentioned statement Ivačković almost defined the picture he wanted to produce – the picture produced only by “pure relations”, by its intrinsic elements of colour, line and surface and their interrelations, and not by “the meaning” or any kind of content that could be imposed upon it from external and visible reality.

Towards the end of his studies Ivačković began to examine the area of abstract painting in his own artistic essays and in the only way he knew – through the learning process he applied in music: “I learned to experience the language of that painting by ‘imitating’ those pictures as you imitate the melody you hear. Personal additions, and creation, come later, only after you have conquered the vocabulary and the technique of the language.” Numerous visual art essays were produced in this period of 1955-1959; one can recognise in them the influence of artists he encountered in those exhibitions or through reproductions, and who followed different paths of abstraction – from Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky, over Serge Poliakoff and Nicolas de Staël to Hans Hartung and Georges Mathieu. However, after his return from Germany Ivačković narrowed the circle of artists who served as “the melody he imitated” and crystallised his own affinities within the space of a painting.

Abstract miniature drawings have been preserved in Ivačković’s legacy; they were made in 1960 and were directly inspired by the painting of Franz Kline. This is perhaps the most precious example of a specific artistic documentation in Ivačković’s opus. Artistic – because those are true artworks notwithstanding their dimensions, and documentation – because the artist bound his small drawings in the form of a notebook. The reproduction of a Kline painting cut out from a newspaper and preserved among the pages containing glued drawings stands as the title of this unusual “manuscript”. However, one has to be very cautious when interpreting these works since they are neither a direct imitation of Kline nor produced with a preconceived idea of homage to this American artist. They demonstrate the postulates of abstract pictures Ivačković shared with Kline and recognised in his painting.

- Firstly the already mentioned modernist understanding of a painting as an independent and emancipated reality. In relation to this it is necessary to compare Kline’s and Ivačković’s arrival at abstract painting. Namely, on one occasion Kline saw a blown-up projected picture of his sketch of a chair drawn on a page of a telephone directory so that contours of the chair vanished and turned into abstract lines. Contrary to Kline who arrived at his abstract picture by means of an unusual experience with a figurative representation, Ivačković entered abstraction directly by means of abstract pictures, Kline’s among others.

- Ivačković’s “Klinean” notebook shows that the act of creating a picture was for him (as it was for Kline) not an uncontrolled act, although his method of working, rapid, momentary and impulsive, implies a different impression. Nevertheless, each stroke is deeply engraved into the artist’s subconscious because it had been repeated and adopted earlier through numerous studies and artistic essays, very much like these small drawings. In case of Ivačković it was a truly rational analysis of the internal elements of the painting – written interpretations, comments and graphic tests of diverse (com)positions of the essential artistic forms –over more than five hundred pages of the journal that he recorded as auxiliary material of his artistic research from the mid-fifties to the second half of the seventies. During the act of creation an artist makes very quick but conscious selections from the multitude of stroke-trace information adopted during the previous experience. One could say that the works produced in the late fifties and early sixties were the initial codes of the big corpus of information, the foundation of a “pre-programmed automatism”, as Ivačković used to call his creative procedure in the following decades.

-There is yet another important element which will remain permanently in Ivačković’s paintings and for which the notebook with drawings was almost an early definition. Each piece of paper was signed with the exact date when it was produced, for example – “10. I ‘60”, “12. I ‘60”, “1. II ‘60”, “20. II ‘60”, “25. IV ‘60”. In that way, the attention was directed not only to the picture as a spatial phenomenon, but also to its temporal dimension – to the moment when it was made. That moment when a certain creative impulse was materialised, a moment of inspiration that collected the condition of the entire artist’s self. That moment would have disappeared in music together with perhaps unforgettable improvisations created within it, but it can be permanently preserved in painting. By noting the time when a picture was made, Ivačković directed the attention to the artist and the act of creation because a date is of great value to us who measure time, but not to the picture whose space is a-temporal. Therefore the notebook filled with drawings presents at the same time a diary about several artist’s days, just as the entire future painting of Ivačković can be read as a journal of his creative life.

The artworks one can define, according to their characteristics, as the earliest authentic creations of the painter Đorđe Ivačković were produced within the clearly positioned coordinates of his painterly space and approach - in 1961 and 1962. We are talking here about a group of pictures executed mainly on 95 × 125 cm paper and made in Belgrade, kept away from the public eye until the artist’s demise, meticulously classified in his painterly folder. They were shown for the first time in a reduced selection of only four pictures at Ivačković’s big retrospective (organised after his death by Gallery RIMA) in the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, in 2015. At the most recent exhibition in Gallery RIMA in Kragujevac, and with this catalogue, more of the mentioned works will be presented to the public as a separate entity that belongs to the initial positions in the genesis of Ivačković’s authentic abstract expression.

All works were made on paper and only one was subsequently mounted on canvas (Painting 2. V ’61). The reasons for choosing paper were mostly of practical nature because of its affordable price, easy purchase and handling (in comparison to the canvas). Also later, until the beginning of the seventies, the majority of his works were executed exclusively on paper (sometimes even on several individual pieces joined together in order to get a larger format) which the artist immediately mounted on canvas – thus proving his affinity for paper as the foundation he knew well and got to like at the time when there was no other choice. The pictures from this group are mostly monochromatic. Ivačković predominantly used black paint with interventions in white and occasional brown hues. Very rarely there were pronounced red or blue tones. In most of the works the foundation remained more or less vacant and uncovered with paint, so that the background with the colour of the paper and the surface allotted to it occupied an equal place in the construction of the picture. Ivačković left on it black traces of his broad and rapid gestures, executed mostly with a broad brush, with sporadic interventions of sprinkled and dripping paint (this was particularly noticeable in Painting 6. X ’61). At first sight it is already clear that Ivačković had definitely chosen an expressive creative procedure that more or less changed its character in the works from 1961. In Painting 1 the strokes are broad, drawn precisely so that the layer of the paint formed the borders of each stroke giving the impression that specific pigment beams were laid one over the other, like those in Soulages’ paintings from the fifties. Painting 2 contains a dense concentration of vertically thrown strokes and incites analogy with Hartung. Certain works, such as Painting, Painting 29. VI ’62, Painting 3¸ seem to have been derived from the drawings in “Klinean” notebook. In the majority of the remaining works, and particularly in those from 1961, these recognisable elements are lost, either rejected completely (as in the case of Soulages-like strokes) or modified with Ivačković’s own gestures.

(complete essay in the printed edition)