At some, certainly historical, moment, art reached a stage at which it could no longerpretend to successfully imitate reality, and instead presented the idea of forming its own reality. This idea led to such radical phenomena, like the creation of its own language,independent of reality, or, in painting, the first paintings that did not represent anything that could be connected to the world that surrounds us. While the radical believers in the autonomy of the painting were led by faith to the ultimate objectlessness,after which they had to leave the brushes and colors and deprive themselvesof painting, declaring its end, the others, more moderate, persisted in believing thata painting could not only exist, but also survive in conditions of complete autonomy.Some artists were led by early abstraction to abstract expressionism, as was the casewith Kandinsky’s successors in the American post-war painting, while others continued to develop geometric and other forms of analytical abstraction. The idea of autonomousart persisted most consistently in painting, the most visual of all art forms.It was embraced as an absolute truth by those artists who believed that a painting has its own life taking place in relation to those elements it needs for its existence andsurvival – art elements: surfaces, colors, lines, points. By organizing these elementson the surface of canvas or paper, artistic relations were reached, the only ones from which the painting lives. With appearance of the theory of high modernism, the ideaof progress that accompanied it ended. The prefix “post” that followed implied a new freshness for art, which was reflected in new media and in the opening of new fieldsof research. For painting, however, that prefix marked the period between two revolutions.The only faith in the progress and survival of “pure” painting remained withthose artists who remained consistent with the modernist concept of self-sufficiency.One of the painters who accepted the belief in the autonomy of the painting and its independent life is Đorđe Ivačković, who studied architecture in Belgrade at the beginning of the fifth decade of the last century and was involved in avant-garde jazz music, and left Belgrade at the beginning of the sixth decade to go to Paris and there began his career as an artist – painter. Unusually, he brought from Belgrade his enchantment with American contemporary art, which placed him in Paris in the circlesIvana Benović AN APOLOGY FOR PAINTING of those painters who are considered representatives of lyrical abstraction, but with significant peculiarities that stem from these different influences.

The placement of Đorđe Ivačković’s works in the context of lyrical abstraction, as hisstyle is most often defined, stems from his involvement in the artistic circles in Paris,France, where that term has been used since the end of World War II as the name forvarious art movements similar to Informel, but also as a name for European versusAmerican art of the same period. The art of Đorđe Ivačković, in the context of the Parisian art scene from the 1960s onwards, is classified as lyrical abstraction on the basisof similarity in dealing with art issues, but on closer inspection, it shows significant differences, primarily when it comes to conceptual foundations, but also in the absence of connections with the object world. The philosophy of existentialism, which ismainly linked to the beginnings of lyrical abstraction, implied in fine art the search forreasons and causes, or the expression of consequences – whether due to later foundor real meanings – while with Ivačković, there is no other cause or consequence otherthan the basic, artistic one, exclusively connected to the research in the field of art issues.On the other hand, if we search for the parallels to his painting isolated from the domestic and the Parisian context, they could be found in the works of American postwar painters, whose works are classified as abstract expressionism, also referred to asgesture or action painting. Ivačković reveals his obvious contacts and familiarity withthe high modernism of the American scene in an interview given to Lidija Merenik in1989 for the magazine Moment, in which he emphasizes the importance of the exhibitionof contemporary American painting held in Cvijeta Zuzorić in 1956/57, not onlyto his artistic formation, but also to his desire to practice painting. The emphasis on action, on the gestural and expressive, brings Ivačković into the connection with De Kooning or Franz Kline, rather than with his contemporaries in Belgrade or Paris.

In the years when Ivačković left Belgrade, the domestic art scene was still developingits modernity in a conformist manner within the frameworks determined by theruling (political) regime and the ideological situation. There was no place for radicalforms of abstraction, which implies dealing with purely artistic problems, the ultimate consequence of which is the achievement of pure objectlessness. In Paris, the city from which all the avant-gardes came before the war and which nurtured the freedom of artistic expression after the war, Ivačković found a fertile ground for his work. Shortly after graduating from the Faculty of Architecture, he realized that the autonomy of art implies its independence from external factors, which in architecture is crucial for the final outcome. As he states in a conversation with Irina Subotić held in 1977on the occasion of his solo exhibition in Belgrade, he found immediacy and complete independence in painting, in which the path from an idea to its material expression depends only on him.