ANTON ZORAN MUSIC
Gorizia (Slovenia, currently Italy), 1909 – Venecia,(Italy) 2005   
He was born in what was then Austro-Hungarian territory and he had first contacts with literature and art in Vienna –where he discovered the work of Klimt and Schiele- and Prague. In 1930 he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. When he finished his studies he went to live in Madrid, attracted by Spanish painting, especially El Greco and Goya. In 1936 he moved to Dalmatia, where he took part in his first group exhibitions. The outbreak of the Second World War prompted him to return to his native town, where he remained until 1943. He then moved to Venice, where he exhibited his first works in the series Motivi Dalmati (Dalmatian Themes) and Venezia (Venice). Accused of collaborating with the resistance, he was deported to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he secretly drew a terrifying documentary chronicle of the horrors that he experienced there, which he salvaged in part after the liberation. After returning to Venice he painted his first self-portraits, although without abandoning landscape figuration, now with a powerful effect of light, which he continued in his so-called “Sienna landscapes”, painted in 1948, when he also made his first lithographs in Switzerland. In 1951, after presenting his first solo exhibition in Paris at the Galerie de France, he settled in the French capital. During the latter part of the fifties, while not giving up painting (with his Dalmatian Lands, 1957, for the first and only time he entered a realm close to abstraction), he intensified his graphic output, winning the First Prize at the Biennale di Venezia in 1956. In 1962 the first catalogue raisonné of his graphic work was published, in connection with his first retrospective at the Brunswick Museum. In 1970 he embarked on one of his most outstanding series, Nous ne sommes pas les derniers (We Are Not the Last), in which he returned to the human tragedy that accompanied deportations, war and violence. Exhibited for the first time at the Galerie de France, in 1971 it began an extensive tour all round Europe, concluding with a wide-ranging retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1972). Further series about landscape (Paesaggi rocciosi [Rocky Landscapes], 1976) and Venetian settings (Canale della Giudecca and Punta della Dogana, 1981; Interni di Cattedrali [Interiors of Cathedrals], 1984) preceded his last great series, which, with the exception of Città (City), 1988, views of Paris at night, took as their central focus a human figure in which he symbolised solitariness and meditation, providing the basis for the major exhibitions of his work presented in recent years, in Rome (Villa Medici), Milan, New York, Paris (Centre Pompidou, 1988, FIAC, Grand Palais, 1995), Valencia (1994) and Bilbao (1999).