My friend Jovan, an extraordinary artist, would have turned 90 today. He passed away a year and a half ago at the age of 88 and had a big influence on me, inspiring some of my proudest artistic work.
Until now, I never wrote a formal obituary — dry, factual writing was very much not Jovan’s style — but I wanted to set down this historical information while I still remembered it. For more colorful descriptions of the man, more in line with Jovan’s spirit, see the eulogy I wrote in 2022 for his Celebration of Life, and the 1989 profile from a local newspaper, which I appended at the end of this post.
Jovan had a long life filled with a wide variety of activities, and this bio is inevitably incomplete. I only knew him his last decade, and there are certain details, especially about his life in Europe, that I’m not able to fact-check. To the best of my knowledge, this information is correct, but I can’t guarantee everything. If you have any corrections, please let me know. I may update this bio in the future as I discover more.
Jovan Demetrius Mihailović
January 15, 1934 (Belgrade, Yugoslavia) — August 1, 2022 (Chicago, Illinois)(Birth name: Jovan Dragoslava Mihailović; artistic names include J.M. Demetrius and Jovan Mihailović Demetrios)
Jovan D. Mihailović was a prolific painter, writer, and violinist who for decades was a muse and personality of Chicago’s artistic community. Often referred to as a modern-day Renaissance man, he created hundreds of paintings, wrote numerous literary works in English and Serbian (plays, novels, and poetry collections), performed music with a variety of ensembles, repaired and restored violins, acted and directed, and taught drama and music. He was an eloquent philosophizer, a lover of cats, and a lifelong aficionado of classical music.
Jovan was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to parents Ljubinka and Dragoslav, a Serbian family in Belgrade’s Slavija neighborhood, with roots in Vranje and Vojvodina, and, according to Jovan, some Sephardic Jewish, Greek, and Roma ancestry. His father came from a landowning family and worked as a banker. Jovan began studying visual art and classical violin at a young age.
Jovan studied playwriting at the Belgrade Theatre Academy, and won a national award for his play The Rain of Professor Noah, a farce based on the biblical story of Noah, which ran for three years in Belgrade and toured Yugoslavia. His play, The Rabbi’s Chair, about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, received an award from Yugoslavia’s Jewish community.
In his twenties, he traveled in Western Europe performing violin in folk orchestras for the Branko Krsmanović and Lola Ribar folk dance ensembles.
Frustrated by limitations on freedom of expression, Jovan left his homeland in 1965 to seek political refuge in Sweden. There, he continued his artistic activities and exhibited paintings at the Bohmann Gallery in Stockholm.
After a brief move to Canada, he arrived in Chicago in 1971, where he remained for most of his life, with the exception of a few years in Sarasota, Florida, where he taught violin, and towards the end of his life, a few years in Rockford, Illinois.
Jovan became a staple of Chicago’s nightclub scene during its heydey of live music, performing violin at a variety of restaurants and clubs including Miomir’s Serbian Club and Europe at Night. His repertoire included Serbian and Balkan folk music as well as Hungarian, Yiddish, classical, American, and miscellaneous European repertoire on violin.
One of his performances, at Dejan’s Restaurant in 1977, was recorded for the Library of Congress as part of the American Folklife Center’s Chicago Ethnic Arts Project. In 1985, he performed violin in a humorous Wendy’s commercial portraying a satirical Soviet fashion show. He recorded one vinyl album, The Magic of the Gypsy Violins.
Jovan performed for years with cimbalom virtuoso Alex Udvary at cafés including Julius Meinl and Kopi. He taught Serbian violin to students Sam Hyson and Lucia Thomas via the Illinois Arts Council’s Ethnic Folk Arts Master Apprentice Program, and he performed with their music and storytelling group, Chicago Folklore Ensemble. Jovan’s music, artwork, and oral history were featured in the Chicago Folklore Ensemble’s album and book combination, The World in Chicago.
Jovan’s paintings were influenced by a variety of artistic styles. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he created a large collection of paintings called Venus of Venice, many of them paired with original poems.
His works were exhibited at several Chicago-area restaurants, cafés, and galleries, including — in his last decade — MAGI Cultural Art Center, Kopi Café, First Slice Pie Café, Metropolis Coffee, Gaudí Café, and others. In 2020, he had a large retrospective exhibition called The Alchemy of Art at Rockford’s 317 Art Collective. In 2022, after his passing, there was a memorial exhibition of his works at Citlalin Gallery.
Jovan incorporated visual art into many of his other projects: he created covers and illustrations for his novels and books of poetry, lavish paintings and etchings on the back of old violins that he collected and restored himself, and elegantly illustrated menus for a restaurant called Little Europe that he briefly ran on Lawrence Avenue.
Jovan self-published two novels: An Icy Day in August (2003), about the Black Plague in Switzerland, and In the Bosom of the Red Flowers: Alexander Sawney Bean and his Twin Brother (2018), about an infamous Scottish cannibal. He leaves behind numerous yet-unpublished works, among them a young adult novel about super-intelligent pigeons called The Rulers of Venice, an illustrated poetry collection called Heaven at Hand, and a book of short stories called His Majesty The Catfish, where each story concludes with a unique catfish recipe.
Jovan continued his theater studies at Northeastern Illinois University and was also involved with Chicago Actors Studio, where he was an assistant teacher and where he directed a production of his original play The Best Shrimp In Town (1994). He worked for many years with a Chicago theater company called Theatre O’ Th’ Absurd, which produced some of his original plays under his own direction, including Cleopatra’s Sex Manual (1995), The Sale of the Brooklyn Bridge (1995, 1996), and A Trap Has a Mind of It’s Own (1996, 1997, 2003). He also directed Theatre O’ Th’ Absurd’s 2003 production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at Performance Loft Theatre.
In Jovan’s later decades, he resided in a small apartment in Chicago’s north side, filled with paintings and manuscripts. Jovan’s life was the subject of the 2007 documentary Renaissance Man.
Jovan had one brother, Miloš, who worked as a doctor in Zurich, Switzerland, but was killed in a mafia-related murder as a young man. Jovan’s mother was killed in the American bombardment of Serbia in the 1990s. Jovan was married and divorced three times and had two daughters, Rebecca Raccanelli and Dorothy-Jane O’Keefe (Raccanelli), who grew up with their mother near Portland, Oregon.
Slection of Photos
In addition to the above bio, here is an article about Jovan published in a community newspaper in the 1980s. (I found it in Jovan’s apartment and typed it up below.)
Renaissance Man
Musician, playwright, artist, actor — Jovan can claim these titles and more
By David Phillips, April 4, 1989
A Pulitzer-Lerner Community Newspaper
Jovan met his wife of three years while playing violin at a restaurant.
“She had been coming in quite regularly and I would always talk to her, and eventually we fell in love,” he says. “It’s a very romantic story.”
In fact, Jovan’s entire life has been a bit of a romantic story. He came to the United States in 1971 after defecting to Sweden from Yugoslavia and then spending three years in Canada. Jovan has a master’s degree in theater arts, has written several plays, some of which were produced in Yugoslavia, and he is currently working on three novels while playing violin at Mareva’s, a gourmet Polish restaurant on Milwaukee Avenue. Oh yes, and he also paints.
“My speciality is in writing and directing, but I think I am a born actor,” says Jovan, whose last name is Mihailovic but who, like Cher, is known professionally by his first name only. “The essence of all these things is communication.”
Jovan, 55, left Yugoslavia to go to Sweden in 1965. “I wanted to meet Ingmar Bergman. At the time, I was a big fan of his work,” he says. “He had just made a new movie which was in the theaters and I went to see it. It was about four hours long and it was the most boring movie I’d ever seen in my life. That kind of ended my infatuation with Bergman. I never met him, but I met a lot of other interesting people. Sweden was like another planet for me.”
When Jovan left Yugoslavia he left a lot behind. Two of his plays had won national awards and one of them, “The Rabbi’s Chair,” a historical play about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was being cast at the time he left. Jovan doesn’t know what became of the play, which received an award from the Jewish community.
He also was given a national award for “The Rain of Professor Noah,” which ran for three years at the National Theater in the capital city of Belgrade before touring other cities in Yugoslavia.
“I call it a tragicomical farce,” the North Town resident says. “It is a satire of the biblical story of Noah. It starts out very funny, but it becomes a play of survival.”
Jovan grew up in Belgrade and began studying music at the age of 6. He played as a classical soloist at the age of 14, but he says he didn’t have the discipline to continue studying music.
Jovan then attended the Theater Academy and began writing plays. He also took up drawing and painting (his work has been exhibited in the United States). Eventually, a love for English and a frustration with the restrictions in his homeland led Jovan to defect.
“You always had to watch what you said to people because you never knew if you could trust them,” he says. “You began to distrust everyone. You began to develop a perverse kind of diplomacy. “I became more and more aware that I needed freedom of mind and thought. That’s when I started to think about leaving.”
When Jovan moved to Chicago he began playing violin for a living. During his off time, he worked toward a master’s degree in theater arts from Northeastern Illinois University. He has been writing steadily, but so far his works have not been met with the same enthusiasm as they were in Yugoslavia.
“Playing music is good because it gives me time to write and I meet lots of interesting people. I’ve thought about teaching, but you end up spending so much time that there would be no time left for writing,” he says. “Music is the best way for me to survive, and I have fun doing it.”
Jovan does seem to have fun when he plays. At Mareva’s, accompanied by a pianist, he performs American pop standards, blended with what he calls “improvised gypsy music.” The music adds a romantic character to the elegant setting.
“Mareva’s is a great opportunity for me. In that surrounding, the music I play has found a home,” he says. “The owners try to provide the best of everything there. I try to give a sweetness and a romance and provide a pleasant escape into a more beautiful world.”
The customers at Mareva’s seem to enjoy the music, pausing during conversations, taking their time with their meals to listen. But Jovan says it isn’t always so.
“Sometimes they are paying so much attention to their steak they barely notice me, but on other nights it is like a concert or something. For the most part they are very appreciative.”
Jovan is a diminutive figure with a face and a manner that exude happiness, even mischief. He has done some comic acting for television commercials, his most visible part being, ironically, in a Wendy’s commercial that poked fun at the Soviet Union. Jovan played a violinist at a Soviet fashion show in which a hefty woman modeled the same outfit again and again.
The commercial, which was meant to show that, unlike at other places, you have a lot to choose from at Wendy’s, was heavily criticized, and Wendy’s removed it shortly after it began running. Jovan’s response: Some people have no sense of humor.
“I thought it was very funny, and I’ve lived on both sides of it. I don’t see why it should have been offensive. Satire is a legitimate art form.”
Although he has done comedy, music and fine art, Jovan still that his main love is literature. He will continue writing and hopes to have something published in America soon.
“Rejection hurts, but it hasn’t killed me,” Jovan says. “I’m like a cat with nine lives, and I’ve lost only one life.”
