|
Music, Zoran Anton [Antonio]
(b Görz, Carniola [now Gorizia, Italy], 12 Feb 1909). Italian painter, draughtsman and printmaker of Carniolan origin. As a child he experienced the confluence of Slavic, Germanic and Italian culture, but as an artist he later drew from French influences. His first encounters with art were in the 1920s, in Vienna with the style of the Secession, and in Prague with Impressionism. From 1930 to 1935 he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Zagreb under Ljubo Babic (1890–1974), a pupil of Franz von Stuck. In 1935 he travelled to Spain, where he was profoundly impressed by the works of El Greco and Goya. At the outbreak of the Civil War he returned to the barren countryside of Dalmatia, which became a major and continuing source of inspiration. It was the experience of World War II, however, which marked his life: he was arrested by the Gestapo and interned at Dachau from 1944 to 1945. There he made a series of drawings, Dachau (artist’s col., see 1977 exh. cat., pp. 1–12), an extraordinary document of concentration-camp life. His first works after his release were watercolours and gouaches of Venice and paintings of the Sienese countryside. In such paintings as Dalmatian Motif (1950; Venice, Ca’ Pesaro) the influence of the landscape emerged more clearly in gentle hills, painted in delicate colours. Music borrowed elements from Byzantine art (for example at Ravenna) and the earth colours and dry handling of fresco painting, a technique that he improved in working with the Venetian painter Guido Cadorin (1892–1976), whose assistant he became in 1946, and whose daughter, the painter Ida Barbarigo (b 1923), he was to marry in 1949. Music’s first major exhibitions were the Venice Biennale of 1948, and in Paris at the Galerie de France in 1952. In the mid-1950s and the 1960s he underwent a period of crisis because of the pressures placed on his natural inclination towards representation by the dominance of the abstraction of the Ecole de Paris. In his prints of this period he returned to the themes of the 1940s. In the series of paintings, prints and drawings We Are Not the Last (1970–76; examples, Paris, Pompidou, and Munich, Neue Pin.), he returned decisively to his origins as a figurative artist in a painful meditation on the terror of Dachau. It was followed by such series as Rocky Landscapes (from 1976), views of Venice (the Giudecca and the Dogana) in 1981, and Church Interiors in 1984. After 1985 he worked intensely on self-portraits and double portraits of himself and his wife.
|
