Mr. Ivan’s works hang in fine art museums and galleries in Cluj-Napoca, Galati, Zalau, Brasov, and Bucharest, Romania as well as in numerous private collections in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Germany, France, Israel, and the USA.
His name is included in the following publications:
– Dictionary of Contemporary Romanian Artists, 1976, by Octavian Barbosa
– Guide to Galleries, Museums, and Artists, 1985-86 (pp. 282), 1991-92 (pp. 222), USA
– Dizionario Enciclopedico Internazionale D’Arte Contemporanea, 1999-2000, Casa Editrice -Alba, Italy
– American-Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences “Romanians in Western Sciences and Culture”, 1996, 2nd ed.
– “Who’s who – Romanians in America – 500 Personalities from USA and Canada “, 2000
– Encyclopedia of Romanian Contemporary Artists, vol. VIII, Arc Publications, 2000
– 20th Century Personalities from Cluj (Essential Dictionary), Cluj-Napoca 2000
– Gallery Guide, NY Nov 2003
The following wrote about Dumitru Ivan and his art:
– Eugen Schileru – Contemporanul, Bucharest, Romania
– Octavian Barbosa – Contemporary Artists Dictionary, Romania (1976)
– Prof. Mircea Zaciu, Aurel Gurghianu, Negoita Laptoiu, Livia Dragoi, Negoita Irimie, Alexandra Rus, Ilie Calian – “Tribuna” “Steaua” and “Faclia”, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
– Charles Nauman, James Howatch, Dr. Graham Thatcher and James Gillihan, as well as other critics in publications from USA.
– Pavel Susara, Ion Papuc, Michaela Bocu, Bogdan Lupescu, Iolanda Malamen, Nicolae Prelipceanu – “România Literar” Bucharest, “Tribuna” Cluj, “Adevarul de Cluj”, “Formula As” Bucharest, “Romania Libera” Bucharest and “Ziua” Bucharest. Study and documentation trips: Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, England, Spain, Mexico, and Malta.

WITH THE BACK AGAINST THE WALL

Dumitru Ivan ,an artist living for decades in New York,is at the same time much more than a professional painter,although he brilliantly illustrates in the most honorable way,this category .He has attended good specialized studies and dealt with painting consistently, with extreme devotion during all his artistic stages.
In this respect, one can say that by learning and working as a painter for a long time in a communist country where culture and education were kept under strict and mutilating control,he had the temerity of not succumbing under the pressing ideologies .He has been shaped as an artist by the Interwar European art model ,first by the Romanian art ,and not by the imported canons of the Soviet occupation. Hence,from his first start he seemed to be slightly anachronical in what he has produced strictly as a professional painter .He also painted flowers but in a more aggressive way emphasizing like many others did before, not the flowers themselves,but the decorations of the vases .He often visited the still life themes with stylized objects or fruits ,vaguely geometrical .He was also concerned with landscapes .It is remarkable to mention the two rural images ,one where the village is surprised as sleeping forever between the old hills and the quiet valleys next to the minimal hedges and polychromatic boundaries .
All these landscapes are joined by urban ones with memorable images from the Cluj of his childhood ,surprising medieval images of an amazing Sighisoara,Venices brought as a tribute to his forerunners who have used the same motifs ,sea scapes and winter landscapes with frozen parks espressive through their polychromatic tones and a scholarly combination of severe greys .If he had limited to only that position,namely of a good professional painter,not leaving his country,Dumitru Ivan could have ascended in time to a university chair ,to awards,titles and the highest place on the social ladder .All these things would have been necessary and beneficial to his career as an artist because the fulfillment of a lifetime work requires not only being endowed with talent and professional skills resulting from attending a good school of a confirmed tradition,working as hard as a slave for many decades,but also some techniques for social ascent .To be successful in art you generally have to belong firmly to a group that conquers its glory collectively,to integrate to the forces of a possible artistic trend under the manifesto of a new aesthetics and to attack from these positions the art market. By fleeing the country to America,Dumitru Ivan deprived himself of all these advantages ,promises and social skills,being left alone with his profession,cutting any chances of an outside support short .He was left alone in despair with his back against the wall ,that is without any chance .If the road to glory can be shortened profitably by different algorithms of reaching the target faster hoping to get to that good social place,so beneficial to the development of an artistic career,if acquiring that glory can be an admirable premise favoring the fulfillment of a destiny,Dumitru Ivan opted to build his career instead in a radical solitude,almost anonymously ,far away from the art groups who lived gregariously,preferring to stay outside the art groups beyond any aesthetic program .
During those years when his native country was still lying sick under the oppression of a grotesque dictatorship,the painter did not give up his country in order to fight ideologies.He was not and did not become a political militant even an anticommunist but he remained only an author of his works ,and what kind of works he had ! When Dumitru Ivan exiled himself voluntarily ,his gesture had had a tragic load ,one that we can barely understand today because in those days ,leaving the dictatorship assumed renouncing the chance of ever coming back .As humans,we are bound to the environment that has shaped us ,to a world to which we belong organically .To cut short your umbilical cord through which you communicate means to accept to be left suspended,having the only advantage of belonging exclusively to your artistic creation .Dumitru Ivan’s professionalism described here is only a masque under which his real personality dwells,that of an original artist .If we consider the exile a kind of social suicide,in this instance, we can appreciate that he had started the hatching,the coming out to light of the creative truth that has represented his intimate nature ,for a long time, although sometimes invisible ,hidden ,or insufficiently manifested .
This habit of getting exiled had existed for ages even during the Ancient Rome when there were some who preferred to leave their native Italy by crossing the see over to Greece .They were told by Horace “Caelum,non animam mutant,qui trans mare currunt”.If you leave and cross not only the sea but even the ocean,the only thing you change will be the sky above .You can’t leave your soul behind,you will take it with you together with your fears and tenderness inside it ,so warns the Latin poet .When I compare Dumitru Ivan as a professional hedonistic producer of paid beauty,whom peers use to decorate their homes and lives,with the real artist,then I assume that he had already dwelled inside the author of the paintings .As an example,let’s take the illustration of this special art theme,the circus which was the painter’s concern from the start,a theme that shows a typical inclination of a specific artistic nature .In a study of an ample erudition,”Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque “,Jean Starobinsky is pointing out that since the ancient Egyptians’time,when a significant artist wanted to explain about his specific nature he used such images of rope-walkers,clowns or buffoons to look at himself maliciously .In light of that study,we can conclude that the circus life tells our artist that his nature is indeed that of a show producer,of derisions and at the same time one full of dangers . It is the nature of a shameless extrovert an unbashful one ,exposing himself to anyone .

Nude, ink on paper, 29/24 cm

Nude, ink on paper, 30/23 cm

Dance, acryl on canvas, 62/40 cm

It is amazing that this author is obsessively concerned with portraits and self-portraits .We also have to mention that in both cases he does not use self-irony or sarcasm as we could imagine somebody who started to be interested of the circus as an art theme would .However,exposing yourself artistically belongs in a way to exhibitionism,typical to the show arts because by painting insistently your portrait means to participate in the show ,exposing yourself ,standing out,showing your identity, your irreducible structure .In a broad way ,any masterpiece,any creation requires a narcissistic act and an aggression towards the world around you ,that the creator wants to change, to dominate ,to subordinate in a way and up to a certain point .By making his portrait, he is offering himself to others and at the same time he is searching desperately for his own self ,fulfilling a dramatic narcissistic act on the long road of looking for his final self .We have to be clear about one thing : Dumitru Ivan is not a real portrait –maker because I have seen only two portraits made to others : one of his mother,as a tribute of his filial devotion and the other one of a really exceptional value ,of his wife .The second one, reminded me through the induced holiness of the brush,of a portrait made by Sabin Popp to Irina Codreanu,also a painter when both of them were students at The Fine Arts Institute in Bucharest. As in the work of the painter who prematurely ended his life in Vienna (who everybody considered holy ) here,with this recent author there is a striking,celestial ,angelic trace of the face portrayed .
The self –portraits are really significant ,being desperate searches of his artistic self always returning to himself and not to others .It is like a rage of dissatisfaction would make him repeat this search endlessly as he would like to register a life history of his face ,always different yet still the same .Two points are to be made here ,one about the volumetry of the drawing,the other one about the color .To clarify the points I made, we should remember the fact that when I describe Dumitru Ivan’s personality I distinguish two distinct compartments: the first belongs to the professional who paints flowers,still life,landscapes on one hand,and on the other hand the real artist who is unfolding an artistic thought of a striking originality in his work.Then I have to consider the series of his multitude of self-portraits as a border between the two sections of his work .Through drawing,these belong to the first category,having in common the strongly suggested presence of the third dimension of the space ,while by the colors used surrealistically in their own way,the above mentioned self-portraits attach themselves to the second category where the third dimension is diminuated sometimes to a complete disappearance .
The drawing from Dumitru Ivan’s portraits is vigorous, emphasizing the architecture of the head and the strong identity of the volumes creating it The respective volumes are so evident that for a moment you could think the drawing hand is hiding a sculptor’s hand .The next moment ,the painter is taking revenge and places colors on that realistic drawing,so lively,so expressive,beyond any realistic pretense,because they talk disclosing aggressively not the way the model was portrayed but only the frenzy of the artist when he was painting his own portrait.Thus,the portrait in case does not belong fully to the mimesis category but to the lyrical one,to the artistic subjectivity .That is why , the self-portraits are not documents of an evolution in time of a face,even of a strictly personal nature .The colors thrown with excitement by the author on this drawing convey many feelings like sadness,despair,melancholy,dark pessimism,disillusionment about the destiny of the world even about God’s .
The last and far more important part than the others belonging to Dumitru Ivan’s work is the one displayed over hundreds of paintings on canvas or on board, on oils or acrylics ,ink drawings or other combination techniques using pastels or charcoal, often crushing the colors directly from the tubes on the work surface,the one where he is raising in the most sacred tone an exalted hymn to feminine sensuality .He started tentatively by tackling the twisted feminine body in a spasmodic movement,rigidly presented geometrically while the background of those paintings were relinquished to small and scholarly games of shades mostly red .And all of a sudden the artist is stepping decisively towards his favorite subject :the feminity in rebellion, aggressive,unbashful and yet of a sacred purity .You can feel a tough realism of the sensual and feminine sentiment and nothing or too little of the formal realism because the artist abandons any claim to suggesting depth,volume and the likeness to reality in his paintings .Using a character ,two or more,the author describes ,or better said ,recreates feminity .Remakable is the work where two women insinuate an overwhelming feminity,showing strength,defiance in sensuality like ripe fruits oozing of so much sap exploding from their bodies.The impression ,the idea is really overwhelming .The realism of the image does not count as it is totally absent .The women’s figures shown are heavy with so much plenary matter and their image ignores strikingly any resemblance with anatomies from the real world .We see immediately that they are dancers who are not resembling in any way Degas’ ballerinas ,toe-dancing sylfids aerial ‘par excellence’.They have heavy flesh ,as dense as lead ( not taking in consideration the color that is always brilliant ) ,explosive,exactly like the model’s flesh repeated indefinitely in different other positions by Maillol in his sculptures .In order to analyze the force and originality of this artistic thought I resorted to a situation from an excerpt by Paul Valery ,the poet who dared two millennia after Plato,to imagine new philosophical dialogues using Socratis as a protagonist .In one of these dialogues entitled “L’ame et la danse ‘,the poet from the last century seems to virtually see the old thinker from the ancient Athens,leading his young disciples and watching some women dancing.He is thinking that they are placed through their activity much higher than the philosophers .He considers them superior because they can express their thoughts not simply just in words but in a more ample and complex way ,through their bodies .They think and communicate their thoughts through their whole bodies ,while the poor philosophers use only their brains to think and express only insipid words .I imagine Dumitru Ivan here ,in this situation sneaking in among Socratis ‘disciples with his easel ,trying to retain in his painting what the dancers are thinking,their philosophy extended to their bodies, and thus of an unequal complexity .
I have stated that up to a point this work cannot be considered realism,but surrealism in its raving alternative,in an expressionist manner with strong metaphysical tints bordering the abstract painting from which it borrows enough technique elements of artistic expression .And yet,what its author reveals is most convincing, plausible and very original .The plausibility of the image here is not placed first,but the feelings it conveys because we deal overall with the veracity of the artistic thoughts.This fact is emphasized by the unleashed movement of the brush,because each work from this cycle through its supposed gesture seems to be elaborated almost instantly , being rather the product of an instantaneous dicte ,overflowing with consciousness,the spasmodic shorthand of a feeling strangled by emotion .The dancers are voluptuous but not lascivious and yet aggressively feminine,unleashed and paradoxically extremely pure,women with massive bodies,in very lively colors,mostly acrylics .They are lonely nudes,sometimes in groups of two,three or more,so well built ,they would have enchanted even master Francois Villon ,women who have reached the peak of their sexual blossoming ,exploding of such a hormonal abundance .
There is a perceptive,permanent ascent in this artistic work because by successive refinement ,the reference to reality is gradually fading away and the initial spontaneity gives way to expert elaboration more and more abruptly .Big nets make the identifying the correspondence between art and the world around it ,more difficult,thus complicating the way we perceive the painting .Spreading all over the surface of the painting,they are part of an artistic ermetization that the author applies to his artwork .These irregular, ample but lively structures which I named nets place themselves on smaller organic shapes being only the magnifying glass of some other shapes appearing as tissues, discovered on the microscope in a histology laboratory .They could be like irregular but living rings from a cut tree ,phosphorescent intarsias,successive alternate holes .In all of these images you guess the shapes of women moving graciously (maybe dancing ?) with heads as ovals like in Ion Barbu’s verse ,”And our heads ,if they exist are ovals, as pale as a mistake “.The same thing happens with the other parts of the women’s anatomy :breasts,thighs,hips,calves,sensual abdomens,all in a supposed unity There are big panels stretching under a dominant color with other different games of color shades controlled with mathematical precision but extremely free with waves crowding on top of each other,masterful compositions,musical streaks, close nuclei, separations hugging each other .
Maybe these are structures of the matter which is not at all compact as we were guessing before .they could be a fabric of trajectories that draw womanly bodies,frugal but intensely voluptuous that warn you of revealing themselves and yet not fully being left in the stage of a promise of a perpetual delusion.Maybe they are only some modules of a promised fulfillment,mysterious,runes,hieroglyphs of a feminine secret described in a final undescipherable alphabet .
These paintings I am referring to are huge panels of oils on canvas,sometimes individualities ,some other times associated in groups of two or three in a dominant color,joined by a scholarly game of colored nuances,with undulating knots,with routes and intersections,with vital itineraries,with shapes alternating holes,real and ample blood sources .This is a world through which a colorful diverse blood is pulsing like in Rilke’s Inferno when Orpheus is passing through looking for his Euridice .That dark ,red blood is pulsing there through the transparent roots of the world, intensely ,underground .You can watch the contours of such mandalas and their undulations ,especially those from the pastels which have to be perceived closely enough, maybe through a magnifying glass,in order to unravel the contortions,the thin lines only intersections and juxtapositions Such an artwork not only pleases the eye hedonistically and aesthetically ,but that person who watches it as an unrepeatable mandala,who accepts to lose his soul in the multiple intersecting images,that one is offered real spiritual exercises of purifying and raising the spirit .
Among all the works belonging to Dumitru Ivan only two big panels strike as different from the others,although,as paintings they integrate completely into his creation .They are totally different from the rest of his creation but only through their themes : in one we see a sequence from a rugby game and in the other one,a crucifixion, a classical theme but,ambitiously original in the end .In the first one we prefigure instead of feminine bodies ,those of men captured in the grip of a specific sports cluster.The ovals of the heads are competing with the ovals of the rugby balls .Two straight lines that traverse the painting in a parallel direction,suggesting the sides of a goal,unify and separate the composition.
In the case of Crucifixion the structure of the work is similar,up to a point ,being also composed of ovals .However,the painter’s intervention offers a clear key to understanding the artwork :a minimal crucifix placed laterally opens the way to identifying a Christ who isn’t crucified as we know, but is hanging over the arms of the cross with his head heavily dropped on the side, a Christ abandoed perpetually by the Father from heavens who left him there in final distress. At the foot of the cross,a woman with hidden identity is crouching .She could be the Mother of God .
When an art personality is really genuine,then it proves to be not tragic in a way,surely dramatic ,with the back against the wall.In the same way,the painting that respects itself is also tragical,fatally with its back against the wall,crucified,frontally irreparable .There is no interpolation possible between its developed surface revealed fully and our glance that could alleviate the impact.
The chance of an artwork is viable only if it shows the complete truth. Dumitru Ivan ,a great painter is to be discovered !

ION PAPUC, writer and philosopher
New York 2013

Dance, mixed technique on paper. 100/75 cm

A CONTESTANT ? !

After the resounding world success of Moscow (1958) , as part of the First Art Triennial of the socialist countries,the failure of socialist realism was clear ,as an aberrant primacy claim of the Communist world in competition with bourgeois art ,making Moscow the new capital of world art after overthrowing the historical capitals – Munich,Paris and New York ,to those able to see and understand more clearly the evolution of art .At the end of the 6th decade of the 20th century,the principles of this much trumpeted artistic ideology started being abandoned,one by one .However, before the first graduates of the new art institutes created by the Communist states could docilely accept the ideological interferences that had invaded the field of artistic creation, while the masters who had survived the Romanian art between the wars had been recycled in the pathetic commissions for guiding artistic creation,accepting at long last the sweet tyranny of state patronage, a stupid arbitrary subterfuge had been created, namely the purification of artists according to class criteria ,favoring young men coming from peasant and proletarian backgrounds .Their success was guaranteed by calculating the admission average adding the so-called social grade to speciality grades,intended to make a difference and favor the children of workers and peasants .
Under these conditions,for young Dumitru Ivan(born February 18,1938 in Sighisoara ),son of lawyer Dumitru Ivan of Cluj—with a memorandist grandfather,teacher in Apoldul de Sus,relative of Nicolae Ivan,archbishop of Vad,Cluj and Feleac,founder of the archiepiscopal Orthodox Cathedral –and Virginia Suciu history teacher,sister of the well known historian Coriolan Suciu,failure was-so to speak guaranteed. The class composition and the past of his family did not recommend him as a fighter on the front of the arts for the success of the new political power. And yet,these new immoral obstacles were not sufficient to defeat the obstinacy of the neophyte young man .
He was admitted at the Art Institute of Cluj,a school recognized for the thematic didacticism of the teachers ;in order to prevent numerous political chicanes brought against undesirable students ,Dumitru Ivan transferred to the Bucharest Academia,where a liberalism of conceptions was promoted ,worthy of the reputation of its famous teachers Alexandru Ciucurencu and Corneliu Baba .It was a good but somewhat unlikely decision,if we do not regard it as a sign of political precocity,which surely had its source in the family environment and in the Transylvanian national tradition .
The ideological monopoly of the state was gradually diluting;in the school ,where it remained a process kept up discretely by the masters of the school ,it was collapsing under the vehement assault marked by the insurgent appetite of the first generations of graduates who steadily regarded beyond theIron Curtain that hid the art of the west, but also rummaged with endless imagination the fertile fields left in decay of the interwar Romanian art and particularly manifested an instinct of artistic creativity looking for freedom ,refusing the torture of any behavioral docility .
The teaching of the party became dull ,losing any class content ,especially after the death of the communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej in 1965 . The economic resort was no longer enough to curb the echelons that refined their culture and esthetic conceptions in the very stimulating and competitive bosom of the cultural institutions created by the communist state and participation with jury in the periodic exhibitions organized by the artists guild ,that discovered a new refinement of metaphoric seduction in the ambiguity of the message and in the formal polysematism of the plastic expression . Examples did not stop multiplying : Ion Pacea ,Ion Nicodim ,Ion Bitzan ,Ion ( Alin ) Gheorghiu ,Ion Salisteanu ,Traian Bradean .It was already difficult to apply the blaspheming label of formalist artist to the protean multitude of forms and formulas that changed overnight the heteroclite relief of national art ,as the artists guild obtained steadily a dangerous autocephalus character for the regime ,escaping the direct influence of the constricting institutions of the state.
In Cluj ,Dumitru Ivan decided quickly ,not having many alternatives to choose from : to follow the dramatic and bloody path of his young professor ,Kadar Tibor who hanged himself in the middle of his studio ,after propping his entire work along the walls or do like the other professor ,painter Radu Maier , who emigrated to Germany .His neophyte protest was less flashy , more discreet and more elaborate .He left the artistic milieu of Cluj for the benefit of an option generating more freedom .Like for any Transylvanian Romanian ,this seemed to come from Bucharest .The Bucharest artistic means brought him the expected gains, first of all the solidity of the craft ,a strong infusion of structural traditionalism and reserved modernity ,reduced to the models of the interwar art ,feeding the incongruent refusal for the moment of adventure in the moving lands of any formula of thesis expression .
The Bucharest climate of art fortified his natural options ,developed dormant abilities linked to color and the construction of the form ,reinforced his sentiment and certainty of civil belonging to a protean intelellectual group fed his responsibility and professional conscience .His Bucharest professor ,Peter Dumitrescu or Florin Mitroi ,maintained his vocation of a resolute modernism ,a discipline of gesture that left him free to resort ,whenever he felt the need ,to the miracle offered by masters like Alexandru Ciucurencu or others from his school .
After graduation (1966 ) ,Dumitru Ivan returned to Cluj with a lesson of great painting of assimilated color .This was in great contrast with the habits of the Cluj school ,horrified of pure tones and vehement and paint contrasts .Munich atavism or Bavarian academism still resisted,innocently , in a poetic or diffuse realism slavishly preferred by professors rather than the suggestion of political class, the languorous accords of colored grays that survived after the entire building had been burned for many years by the flames of the crazy revolutions of the great torturers like Van Gogh ,Cezanne ,fauvists or expressionists who ate color and blew flames by mouth .
He domesticated in his painting the consequences of his magisterial fire through the don-Quixotic painting of the national landowners ,a painting of full and active senses ,granted to a conceptual living which found in art both its Epicurean variation and the aristocratic noblesse ,socially ready ,of the interwar precursors .He reduced his axes of his art to the coordinates of a geometric locus where they met an ideal expression, simple accords of color ,complementary contrasts ,activated by a chromatic sensorial of adjacent chromatic fields ,a tectonics of graphical and gestural refined surfaces ,a solid structural building of the composition that keeps alive (vital equilibrium ) the whole chromatic load .
Almost a decade followed this path of clarification — a time too short to define a coagulated ,final work .The years that followed the strange period of ideological relaxation until 1972 were insufficient to build an inexpugnable barrage in front of a new ideological diluvium that came orchestrated under the attack of party propaganda .These were years of a reclusion accepted with stoicism ,but also tears of historic confusion ,felt as such by the entire guild of plastic artists .Under these conditions ,the painter remembered the examples of vhis first professors from Cluj ,Kadar Tibor and Radu Maier .His departure to America ,in 1983,meant an ambiguous solution,from an existential and artistic viewpoint : it was a self imposed exile ,an artistic suicide ,an existential protest and an evasion from an unhealthy conceptual universe in which the regime had installed itself .At their intersection there was the moral solution ,meaning the refusal ,at any cost ,of having a split personality and of opportunistic and conjectural lie .
Paradoxically ,the American solution activated the protesting sense or the work ,by which he passed with arms and baggage into a different ,strange ,indifferent world ,educated differently ,even hostile to his conceptions The character of his protest ,with the risk of aggravating his own existential condition and even striking his own art ,confirmed his own saying ,namely that no onewas a prophet in his own country .

ARTICOL “FACLIA “ CLUJ 3 August 2010
VASILE RADU , art critic and appraiser

ROMANIAN ARTIST MAKES HIS MARK IN QUEENS

MARIE GLANCY, critic – The Cronicle”, New York , 2008