Nevena Martinović
ĐORĐE IVAČKOVIĆ: PAINTING AND JAZZ

From the 1950s and his first encounter with the works of French and American contemporary artists to the beginning of the new millennium, when he gradually ceased to paint, Đorđe Ivačković spent sixty years of continuous artistic activity and built a vital symbiosis of his two greatest affections in art – music and painting, or more precisely, jazz and abstract painting.

Before his serious engagement in visual arts, Ivačković was a devoted Belgrade jazzer. Although musically educated from his early years and able to play piano and accordion, he did not choose to study music, but went to the Belgrade School of Architecture after completing high–school in Novi Sad (1948). In the fifties, the capital of Yugoslavia was opening to the Western world and this tendency was most obvious in the area of culture and entertainment. Cinemas were frequently showing American films and radio was broadcasting jazz, soon to become the music of dancing–halls and parties. The population of Belgrade was able to see artworks from the greatest world museums and works by the most important contemporary artists from America and Western Europe. Despite a continuing ideological control and censorship, the political turn to the West after the break with the Soviet Union in 1948 propelled the development of social and cultural life of Belgrade and the young, to whom Ivačković also belonged, felt its long–lasting and significant influence. As one of the most important legacies of American culture, jazz was in the post–war period one of the main paths for the dissemination of American influence in Eastern Europe. The Voice of America broadcast in Yugoslavia in the fifties and as Ivačković used to say, that radio–station was „to blame” for his first encounter with jazz from the West Coast. Ivačković did not even consider painting as a profession in the first years of his studies, but his interest was then diverted from architecture by jazz. He not only fervently listened to jazz but played it on the piano and accordion, with his band, mostly at Belgrade parties. He was known in jazz circles as Đorđe „Bop” Ivačković, and in surveys of the local jazz scene he is mentioned as the first jazzer with a private tape recorder. Since his father was working in the United Nations, he brought this precious and then very rare equipment from abroad. According to some later statements by the artist, at that time he was conducting a small radio orchestra. Although he stopped playing a few years later, in the fifties Ivačković took active part in the social life of Belgrade where the musicians playing in dance–halls „were the stars (big names), parties were held for their sake and talked about for days”. Since many jazzers had nicknames, perhaps it is not unimportant to note that his was related to be–bop, a kind of modern jazz; musicians who later became the main protagonists on the local jazz scene had much more personalized nicknames, frequently without any reference to music. Nevertheless, Ivačković gradually left active music engagement because of a new creative obsession in his life – painting.

„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. It was probably related to my desire to communicate with the time... I always liked what was fashionable and in” – the artist remembered many decades later in an interview for the magazine Moment (1989). An inquisitive young man who liked to take part in everything new and modern in his surroundings, he found spare time between his faculty obligations and evening jazz sessions to visit the cultural events which brought Western world, primarily the world of art, into the Yugoslav everyday. In 1952 Ivačković saw the exhibitions “Contemporary French Art” with works from post–impressionism to new primitivism and figurative art. He was particularly impressed by painters gathered under the title „Abstract”: Hartung, Deyrolle, Lanskoy and Esteve. This show tickled his curiosity, but the exhibitions he saw in the years to come inspired a radical turn in his life and creative engagement: “Contemporary American Art” (1956) and “Contemporary French Painting” (1958). For the young jazzer who drew only occasionally, the encounter with artworks by painters unknown to him was decisive: Hartung, Schneider, Soulages, Matieu, Zao Wou–Ki, then Kline, De Kooning, Pollock and other protagonists of French lyrical abstraction and American abstract expressionism. The strongest impression Ivačković had at these exhibitions was the analogy between that painting and his love for jazz. He described this vital experience in his first interview: “Everything was clear to me. It was an expression of motionand had a direct influence on me. Maybe it was so because of music, even classical music I have known since my early childhood, maybe music taught me to think abstractly about relations, to get involved in manifest relations only, and not in ‘meanings’ in a literal sense” . As if Đoka “Bop” saw jazz for the first time! His awareness of the fact that the same qualities he found in jazz were possible and realisable in visual arts elevated his totally informal painterly experience onto a high position among creative priorities, so that he spent more spare time with the brush and paints than with his musical instruments. As he used to “copy” the way Americans played jazz, so he tried in his first works to follow the method of the great painters of abstract art. There are temperas, ink drawings and watercolours in his sketchblocks from 1957–1959 which clearly refer to the works by Miro, Mondrian, Esteve, Lanskoy, Matieu, Kline, Soulages, Hartung and a few more abstract painters whose works he saw at Belgrade exhibitions between 1952 and 1962. This imitation of his selected paragons of exclusively abstract inclination very soon grew into a method that enabled him to penetrate the essence of their art and understand the basic elements of their visual qualities. Owing to his engagement in jazz Ivačković knew that “every successful creator used to be an imitator” until he learned the language of jazz – “with an auditory influence of one person upon another, and not only the influence of sheer notes on the paper” . As he gradually came in jazz from imitations to personal improvisations, so he made a selection of paragons in painting by the end of the fifties and relied mostly on Kline, Hartung and Soulages, and in their wake sailed into his own painting. In his paintings from the early sixties, the influence of these artists is no longer literal, it appears as an echo – sweeping gestures and black graphics, dark layers of paint, transparent strokes and a visible act of painting, bare parts of the paper of canvas as equal elements of composition – all these characteristics can be found in the works of Ivačković’s paragons, but as entities, by themselves, they belong exclusively to his own visual language. After his graduation (in 1955) and the compulsory military service (1956) Ivačković ended his long deliberation between music and painting as his future profession. As he recorded then in his diary, one of the main advantages of painting over jazz was that the momentary burst of inspiration realised through a direct and momentary creative act – in jazz improvisations and quick strokes in painting – remained permanently “caught”, arrested and recorded in a painting because it happened in the tangible space bordered by the edges of the canvas or paper. In music, however, even the most brilliant improvisation disappeared in time if not immediately recorded on a sound support (remember that Ivačković’s father brought the first tape recorder to Belgrade only in 1957), faded in memory and could not be transferred into an artwork of lasting value.

A year of separation (during his army service) from the current developments in everyday cultural and artistic life additionally influenced his dissatisfaction and bitterness for not belonging to the environment of his paragons in art. He had made a firm decision to be a painter and with that intention he left for Italy the following year to get acquainted with the ongoing art life there, although it seemed to him to be just a distant echo of the Paris school. With the same intentions he travelled to Germany in 1959, the time of great exhibitions of contemporary American painting in Munich, where he saw Kline, Rothko, De Kooning, Pollock, Reinhardt and others. He found that the works of abstract expressionists were sensational, not a bit less than the works of French artists of the post–war Paris school. Those were his motives to set out on his painterly voyage, and Paris was the place where he wanted to start his career as a painter. He moved to the City of Light permanently in the last months of 1961. Very soon he found his place in a specific circle of artists – among visual artists and theorists who were at the same time jazz musicians and lovers of jazz.
In 1963 he had his first solo show in the Gallery Le Soleil dans le tete, and the preface for a modest catalogue was written by Jean–Jacques Leveque, a passionate proponent of painting inspired by jazz. Before that exhibition Ivačković had already developed a recognizable visual expression – almost monochromatic paintings experienced primarily as the results of the act of painting – emphasised physical and gestural relationship between the artist and the painterly foundation (at that time, mostly paper which the artist later mounted on canvas) – placed on the floor it was an exercise ground for Ivačković’s playing with pigment and sand, layered either by brush strokes or by sprinkling and dripping. Leveque compared Ivačković’s paintings with the music of Thelonius Monk, alluding to similarities between the painter’s thundering blows of paint on paper and Monk’s pounding on the piano keys, with one difference, the short intervals of painterly creation would remain permanently in their place . It may be interesting to note that through Leveque Ivačković got acquainted with one of the forerunners of be–bop, the kind of modern jazz after which Ivačković got his nickname in the days of his active participation in jazz. In the 1960s Ivačković took part in a few exhibitions, mostly organised by Leveque, gathering visual artists inspired by jazz, from the less formal in the Gallery Zoning (1965, 1966) to the ambitious show in the Museum Galliera entitled The Time of Jazz, in 1967. The last one was a panorama of known artists whose exhibited works were somehow related to jazz. Leveque’s loose criteria in the selection of works and artists were not particularly appreciated by the critics, because there were both figurative and abstract painters of different styles and diverse movements. The exhibition displayed works by Vasarely, Leger, Kupka, Picasso, Matta, Dubuffet, Fautrier, Sonia Delaunay, Duvillier and others but the artworks were related to jazz only nominally, through distant associations or, on the other hand, quite illustratively with representations of jazz bands or portraits of jazzers. However, a certain number of contemporary artists, including Ivačković, exhibited paintings related to jazz by sheer creative philosophy, since they had sumptuous experience both in jazz and in painting. One should certainly mention the names of Michel Tyszblat and Daniel Humair, two painter–jazzers (Tyszblat played the piano and Humair the drums), with whom Ivačković’s painterly passageway frequently crossed; Ivačković’s son testifies that his father and Tyszblat were also personal friends.

At the same time Ivačković organised his second solo exhibition in the Parisian Gallery Cimaise Bonaparte (presently, Gallery Daniel Templon). By then he was a well–known young painter in Paris primarily owing to his participation in the Biennial of the Young (1965 in the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art). Ivačković was privileged, together with seven other young painters, to show his big format paintings to the global public. His paintings were mounted in the big entry hall of the Museum. Namely, the French Association of Art Critics had selected that year four of its young members to make the selection and present the artists. One of them was Jean–Jacques Leveque and, together with his colleagues, he visited the studios of a great number of artists in order to choose those not yet renowned and therefore still fostering an honest creative energy, unburdened with the laws of the market. Eight Paris painters, including Ivačković, were chosen unanimously. At this big international exhibition Ivačković was in the French selection while Yugoslavia was represented by Veličković, Damnjan, Turinski and Naumov. The three paintings measuring 260 x 240 cm met the visitors in the entry hall and for the first time brought the attention of Yugoslav professionals to Ivačković, a painter until then unknown in his fatherland but already acclaimed by young French critics. In addition, his appearance at the Biennial of the Young moved Ivačković away from the usual jazz–painterly context into broader visual developments in Paris, and in the years to come gallerists and art critics became more interested in his art. By the early seventies he participated in the most significant exhibitions in Paris and Belgrade and continued frequent appearances in the seventies and the eighties: May Salon (1970, 1972, 1974, 1978, 1985) and the Salon of the Great and Young (1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1987) in Paris, the Triennial of Visual Arts (1967, 1970, 1977) and October Salon (1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975) in Belgrade.

In 1971 he had his third solo show, but the first for the Yugoslav audiences – it was organized in the Youth Centre in Belgrade. Although this time the catalogue entry was written by Georges Boudaille with the first serious analysis of his works in the historic, stylistic context of visual arts, the general public continued to pulsate with his relationship to music. Therefore, reviews referred to canvases “treating the issue of musical qualities of an artwork”, that Ivačković’s paintings were “visual transpositions of musical thinking” . Ivačković was certainly the instigator of this because in his interviews he clearly remembered the unusual artistic event in which he himself took part: “Not long ago I participated in an interesting experiment. Together with my colleagues I accompanied the jazz orchestra of Phil Woods on their European tour and painted directly under the influence of music” . Those were evenings when Woods’ orchestra (with Daniel Humair, Henri Texier and Steve Kuhn) played jazz, modern ballet danced live and there were also film projections, while Ivačković painted his big format canvases following the chords of their improvisations. During these specific multimedia performances the audience had opportunities to watch direct – physical and psychological – relations between jazz and painting.

The sixties marked Ivačković’s entry onto the French visual arts scene and the first big successes in Paris. In this decade he joined the Paris circle of artists–jazzers and participated in exhibitions dedicated to jazz. The shows where he worked together with Leveque and appeared with Tyszblat and Humair were very important for his positioning within the art circles but also influenced the first official interpretations of his painting outside the jazz context. Only in the second half of the sixties, the critics gradually stopped using jazz analogies and placed his works in the exclusive context of French abstract painting. The early seventies brought the first two serious reviews of Ivačković’s works (by Georges Boudaille and Paule Gauthier) and these definitely secured his position in the world of contemporary visual art, primarily of France and Paris. Even when his painting underwent significant changes after the end of the seventies and when the creative procedure was no longer a carrier of meaning as the basic element of the painting – his connection to jazz continued, less as a motive for exhibitions and much more as an essential creative foundation, as the artist used to underscore in the following decades.

From the very beginning, Ivačković’s painting mostly relied on his jazz playing experiences. On the one hand, this was very practical – first in the way he learned about painting by imitating and reproducing the works of his paragons in art, and then in the very act of painting. While in his studio, Ivačković used to lay sheets of paper or pieces of canvas on the floor, then play jazz very loud from big loudspeakers and all the time move around his painterly foundation, bent over it, making one painting after another, incessantly, for the duration of his creative ardour. Therefore, frequently his paintings are marked by the same date of creation, since on days of very strong inspiration, he would make even up to ten paintings. Nevertheless, his relationship to jazz was of an exceptionally synthetic nature. Ivačković identified the linear structure of his paintings with the framework of a musical composition and colours with musical tones, thus transposing the essential elements of music into the painting. Leveque was reminded by his forceful thrusts of paint on the canvas of Monk’s playing, and Ivačković’s paintings from the second half of the seventies he compared to solo passages on the drums. „I try to express in my paintings an analogy with contemporary jazz which is constantly evolving. Time in jazz is the same as the foundation in painting. I try to transpose fugues, rhythm and the sound of jazz. The material is different but the problem of instant creation is the same: liberation of emotional charge in improvisations” – said Ivačković about the last exhibition inspired with jazz in which he participated in 1991. The last sentence opens up an important question of the closeness between the essence of jazz and abstract painting – the unchangeable substance of both arts. First of all, Ivačković believed that an abstract painting, stripped of any associations to the world of objects was equal to music, even gave her precedence in its comprehensive keeping and understanding of the results of a creative act. Although he had entered painting as a jazzer, he got to know the history of art and recognized the circle of artists he belonged to, from Kandinsky to the painters of high modernism. For Ivačković, jazz and abstract painting were two equally valuable ways to express his creative personality in a given moment without the mediation of description or narration. Additionally, in both cases, the process of performance or creation was much more important than the preconceived notion or composition, “how” was more important that “what”. Before he would begin to paint, Ivačković knew only the direction of the initial stroke, for example, he painted a vertical and from that stroke on he plunged into the course of his gushing and rapid moves. Those moves were not crowds of random strokes or their accidental traces on the canvas. Ivačković used to call his working process a pre-programmed automatism, alluding to the fact that although he made his paintings in the “gust” of inspiration, very quickly and energetically, in fact a control of the accumulated experience and exercise deposited in the subconscious managed the entire creative process through rapid and skilful strokes. To know the material and to be able to manage it, to run the creative process – those were the essential factors of Ivačković’s successful abstract painting, with which the painter was able to reveal his individuality. Did he not transfer to the painting process Gillespie’s first condition for a successful jazz musician: “To have control over the instrument: chords change quickly and one has to think quickly, there is no time for queries”? Georges Boudaille notices that Ivačković’s paintings are not accidental interminglings of unrelated layers of paint, that the power of his communication “in fact depends on the artist’s permanent control and presumes a particular virtuosity, and Ivačković has plenty of that at his disposal.” The control grew out of constant work: sketching or making of smaller paintings before the big ones because, as the artist said, they served to “show errors, deliberations, repentances, all the elements that constitute our lives”. In that way Ivačković built his own relationship between strokes and traces, automatically realised in his rapid creations. A jazzer would recognise in this approach a statement by Miles Davies that “freedom is not contained in unusual playing, but in controlled freedom”.

It may be important to underline that his paintings are not titled and that the painter almost always engraved the date of the painting into the paint. The absence of titles clearly indicates the absence of any non–painterly contents and the date introduces a temporal determinant into the painting. By precisely recording the day when a painting was made Ivačković wanted to preserve memories of the precise time of inspiration that resulted in a given painting. With this temporal factor he produced a unique spatial–temporal symbiosis between painting and music. Each of his paintings can be seen as a jazz improvisation created at the recorded moment but preserved within the area of the painting. In that way the overall opus of Ivačković was a many–decades long jam–session comprising an unchangeable base (pure, abstract painting) and many hundreds of improvisations (his paintings) - its character altered in a clash of the artist’s personality and his time.