Zoran Mušič

Biography

In the autumn of 1944, in Dachau, a man with a number instead of a name hid scraps of paper under his clothing. He was the Slovene artist Zoran Mušič, and he drew what surrounded him in the camp.

He was sent to Dachau in November 1944. In early October in Venice the Gestapo had arrested him together with a group of Slovene and Italian anti-fascists connected with the resistance; he spent a month, or by other accounts several weeks, in prison in Trieste. He was offered a place in the units of local collaborators in Istria, and he refused. Some of the camp sheets were lost, and those that survived were drawn mostly in May 1945, after liberation, when the prisoners were still waiting to be sent home.

He was born on 12 February 1909 in the village of Bukovica near Gorizia, then in Austria-Hungary, now in Slovenia. His father was headmaster of the village school, and his mother taught there. His childhood was a series of expulsions: in 1915, when fighting began on the Isonzo, his mother took the children to Arnače in Styria; in the spring of 1918 the family returned; in 1919 the Italian authorities expelled them again, to Carinthia, and after the plebiscite of 1920 they had to leave there too. They settled in Lower Styria. From November 1920 Zoran studied in Maribor and finished secondary school in 1928, then made a short trip to Vienna. From 1930 to 1935 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, chiefly under Ljubo Babić, and took his degree in 1934. In the spring of 1935 he went to Spain for three months, living mostly in Madrid and copying Goya and El Greco. In Maribor and Hoče, and from 1940 in Ljubljana, he painted and exhibited, and in 1942, together with Avgust Černigoj, he painted church interiors in the Gorizia region; in Gradno he painted the fourteen Stations of the Cross for the Church of St George. In 1944 his exhibitions were held in Trieste and Venice.

After liberation by the American army he returned to Ljubljana in early June 1945 and was treated in the hospital at Golnik. At the end of July, under pressure from the new authorities and reproaches from colleagues, he left for Gorizia, and in the autumn he settled in Venice. In September 1949 he married the Venetian painter Ida Cadorin Barbarigo. In 1950 he won the Gualino Prize at the Venice Biennale, in 1951, jointly with Antonio Corpora, the Prix de Paris in Cortina d’Ampezzo, and in 1956 an award for printmaking at the Biennale.

From 1952 he lived mainly in Paris, worked with the Galerie de France and was counted among the third School of Paris, while keeping his studio in Venice. According to the art historian Zoran Kržišnik, he was allowed into Slovenia for the first time only in 1956; before that he had not been given a Yugoslav visa.

The cycle “We Are Not the Last”, made in the 1970s from his camp experiences, brought him his widest fame. Later he painted Venetian churches and views of the city, double portraits with his wife, and self-portraits; in old age he was almost blind, and he signed his last works in 2000. To my mind, the mature Mušič cannot be understood without the camp drawings: before them we see a competent academic colourist, after them an artist of quite a different kind.

He was made Commandeur of the Order of Arts and Letters in France (1981), received the Prešeren Award for lifetime achievement in Slovenia (1991), the Legion of Honour in 1990, and in 1999 the Slovene Golden Order of Freedom. In 1991 a gallery of 134 graphic works donated by him opened at Dobrovo Castle. The 1995 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris brought together more than 250 works; it was opened by the presidents of France and Slovenia. In 2003 his works from the Patti Birch collection were shown at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

He died in Venice in 2005, aged 96, and is buried in the cemetery on the island of San Michele.