Z. MUSIC

Zoran Music – © Jean Blaise Junod 1981

Zoran Mušič est né en 1909 à Gorizia, en Dalmatie (région de Slovénie). Après des études aux Beaux-arts de Zagreb (1930-1935), il voyagea en Italie, en Espagne et à Paris. Il effectua des copies de tableaux de Goya et du Greco, au musée du Prado. Sa première exposition personnelle eut lieu en 1938. En 1944, il fut arrêté par la Gestapo et déporté à Dachau. Cette période de captivité et de souffrance détermina tout son oeuvre à venir. Lors de sa captivité, il réalisa au risque de sa vie, une centaine de dessins décrivant ce qu’il voyait, c’est-à-dire l’indescriptible. Zoran Mušič fut saisi par une incroyable frénésie de dessiner, peut-être sa seule issue pour s’en sortir.
Au sortir de cette douloureuse expérience, il fit des séjours réguliers à Venise et en Suisse puis s’installa à Paris en 1952. En 1995, il a fait partie de la sélection pour le centenaire de la Biennale de Venise. Il s’éteint le 25 mai 2005 à Venise.

Born in 1909 in Gorizia, in Dalmatia (region of Slovenia) and died in Venice in 2005, Zoran Music is a painter and printmaker of the «Ecole de Paris». In 1934, after graduation at the Fine Art School in Zagreb, he travelled extensively (Italy, Spain and Paris). His first solo exhibition took place in 1938.In November 1944, he was arrested by the Nazi German forces and sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he made more than 100 sketches of life in the camp, some under extremely difficult circumstances. From the drawings executed in May 1945, he managed to save around seventy. After liberation by Americans in 1945, Mušič returned to Ljubljana. There, he was subjected to the pressures by the newly established Communist regime and moved to Gorizia already at the end of July 1945. In October 1945 he settled in Venice.
In 1950 he won the Gualino prize and in 1956 the Grand Prize for his Graphic work at the Venice Biennale. In 1951 he was awarded the Prix de Paris. After 1952 he lived mainly in Paris, where the «lyrical abstraction» of the French Informel determined the art world. Throughout this period he kept his studio in Venice and exhibited again at the Biennale in 1960, when he was awarded the UNESCO Prize. The much acclaimed series We are not the Last, in which the artist transformed the terror of his experiences in the concentration camp into documents of universal tragedy, was made in the 1970s. In 1981 Mušič was appointed «Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres» in Paris. Mušič’s work has been honoured in numerous international exhibitions, such as the large retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1995, opened by the French and Slovenian presidents.
In 1991, Mušič was given the «Prešeren Award» for lifetime achievement, the highest decoration in the field of the arts in Slovenia.

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Oeuvres disponibles / Available Works