Music, Antonio Zoran

Zoran Mušič was a perpetual traveler through the twentieth century. He was born on
February 12th, 1909 in Bukovica, a village next to the Karst Plateau above Trieste near Gorizia and
the Gorizia Hills. His Slovenian family (his parents and their two sons) was forced from the area by
the thundering artillery of the Isonzo Front. They found refuge in Styria and Carinthia, where they
remained until November 1920, when they settled as refugees in the newly established Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Young Zoran attended school in Maribor for ten years. After graduating
from the teacher’s college, he found himself in bustling Zagreb, where he continued his education at
the Academy of Fine Arts. During his first year, he was taught by various professors, including the
painter Vladimir Becić and the graphic artist Tomislav Krizman. In his second year, he decided to
continue his studies under the charismatic Ljubo Babić. This painter, scenographer, designer, art
historian, and friend of the prominent Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža accompanied the Slovenian
artist up to his graduation and for decades onward. Babić was always good at selecting the most
talented students, including the Slovenians Gabrijel Stupica and Marij Pregelj.

During the 1930s, young painters developed as artists and shaped their personalities in
Zagreb, a large city that was the most cosmopolitan in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Students visited
theaters, cinemas, and exhibitions by George Grosz and French painters, and especially Picasso. They
felt they were at the center of Europe rather than on its periphery. Up until his heyday in Paris, Mušič
built on his experiences from the Zagreb school, including the influences of Antun Motika, Vjekoslav
Parać, Emanuel Vidović, and others. His 1935 excursion to Spain was inspired by Babič’s advice at the
academy, where they had looked for the starting points of the colors and light used by impressionist
painters in Goya and his predecessors, and on this trip Mušič also learned more about a socially and
politically more advanced country than Yugoslavia. He followed his mentor step by step, and he
gradually established his own style.

The second chapter of Mušič’s path to artistic independence was stimulated by his visits to
Dalmatia, the first ones documented in 1934 and the last ones in 1940 at Cavtat. Almost every
summer, the talented painter visited the island of Korčula, where he created a series of gouache
paintings featuring women selling fruit, the karst landscape, donkeys, and markets. He spent time
with Croatian, Slovenian, Swiss, and other artists on the island. Andro Vid Mihičić, an art historian
from the Sorbonne, who succeeded Babić at the Zagreb Academy after leaving the Franciscan order
in 1947, was most likely among the initiators of the gatherings and discussions on painting. By 1941,
Mušič and other members of the Club of Independent Slovenian Visual Artists gradually formed the
core of the most promising individuals involved in the arts in Slovenia. Their work and skills, perhaps
more developed than those of their literary counterparts, laid the foundations for the envisioned
Slovenian academy of fine arts.

After the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded and divided by the Axis forces, life changed for
everyone. Mušič was greatly impacted by the war, especially by his experience of the Dachau
concentration camp. The Gestapo arrested the painter in October 1944 in Venice, where he was
indirectly involved in rescuing Allied pilots. Because he refused to join the Home Guard, he was sent
to the infamous concentration camp. He used to point out that suffering among the dead and dying
at Dachau had a life-long effect on him. As a mature artist and a changed man, Mušič returned to his
homeland optimistically, carrying with him hundreds of drawings depicting the dead and a booklet of
Rembrandt reproductions. However, he soon left Ljubljana in disillusion to escape political pressures
and moved to Venice. After the Second World War, Zagreb, with Babić, was the first Yugoslav city to

welcome him. Up until 1956, Mušič could not obtain a visa to visit his friends and relatives in the new
Yugoslavia. However, in Zagreb he was able to display two of his drawings from Dachau, which he
referred to as his “life academy,” as early as 1954 at one of his mentor’s exhibitions. Europe was only
able to appreciate the importance of these drawings at the grand exhibition Arte e Resistenza in
Europa (Art and the Resistance in Europe), held in Bologna in 1965.

In the 1950s, Mušič nostalgically introduced colorful little horses and karst landscapes into
his motifs, with which he moved from Venice to Paris. Restless little horses were the core of his
tapestry for the steamboat Augustus and the ornamentation for the Dornacher residence near
Zürich. New visits to his relatives in Slovenia and friends in Istria and Dalmatia, together with the
Paris trends, drove the little horses from his easel. The motifs grew into a noble color harmony of
seemingly abstract, sunlit landscapes. In all of this, Mušič was among the most frequent exhibitors at
the International Graphic Biennial in Ljubljana and he was a window into the world for young
Slovenian artists. He was a respected member of the Paris School (the École de Paris), a famous
European artist that staged one presentation after another of timeless paintings and well-thought-
out graphics at the world’s best-known galleries.

In the 1970s, the painter used a new, acrylic technique to harken back to his most painful
memories—that is, the figures of people suffering. He depicted on canvas with great mastery what
Paul Celan and Ismail Kadare had expressed in words. From camp victims, the mute dead turned into
an everlasting message and warning: “We are not the last.” With his Dachau cycles, the artist
completely astonished the connoisseurs of modern trends and attempts at the Avantgarde, and also
gallery owners. With their everlasting expressiveness and explanations provided by Zoran Kržišnik
and, later on, Jean Clair, Mušič’s humanized depictions of the dead from the camps impressed the
world. This was followed by vegetal motifs of burned oaks with an implied will to live. During the
waning period of his life, the painter created series of Venetian panoramas and cathedrals with
multiple meanings. The lonely thinker with impaired vision increasingly kept himself to his studio. He
created old-age portraits of himself and his wife, and he quietly continued his friendship with
François Mitterrand. The artist died on May 25th, 2005 in Venice.

Precisely eighty-five years after Zoran Mušič graduated from the Zagreb academy under
Ljubo Babić, Galerija Zala is displaying a selection of the artist’s creative work in Ljubljana. Mušič’s
early work is also included in this year’s exhibition “Na robu” (On the Brink), held at the Museum of
Modern Art in Ljubljana. Older paintings herald his artistic development during the 1930s, and others
show the highlights of one of the last twentieth-century classical painters, the quality of whose work
took him from the margins to the very center of the European fine arts. Regardless of its dimensions,
each painting speaks for itself.

To mark the 110th anniversary of Zoran Mušič’s birth, the gallery is putting on display
certified originals that are usually hidden away in private homes. Even more than a decade ago,
when Mušič was still somewhat ignored in Slovenia, the exhibitions at Galerija Zala confirmed that
this European artist was present not only in major galleries in Venice, Paris, and New York. After a
series of six exhibitions of works from private collections held in Ljubljana, Belgrade, London, and
Vienna, the painter continues to return to the Slovenian cultural capital, where he is featured in a
permanent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

The older paintings displayed at Galerija Zala document Mušič’s prewar creative work,
especially in Dalmatia and Ljubljana. A high-quality shift in his work is his popular postwar series of
colorful little Dalmatian horses, followed by the karst landscapes between Istria and Primošten
inspired by Tachism. The core and highlight of his artistic expression are his famous depictions of dead victims at concentration camps entitled We Are Not the Last. Similarly informative are his
burned oak trunks filled with life energy. The selection of works presented also features Venetian
landscapes, the atmosphere inside cathedrals, and portrait presentations of the painter and his wife
in their old age. Mušič incorporated the entire destiny of a reflective and sensitive humanist of the
second half of the twentieth-century into his artistic message. The academy-trained painter
remained faithful to drawing, graphics, and canvas, and the motifs he became familiar with during his
studies. Nonetheless, he developed his artistic expression to unimagined depths unaffected by
tradition or fashionable isms. He always remained faithful to his maxim: “I paint for myself because I
have to.”

Gojko Zupan