Zoran Mušič

Zoran Mušič
Zoran Mušič
	; Zoran Mušič in the 1960s
Born	12 February 1909; Bukovica, Austria-Hungary (now in Slovenia)
Died	25 May 2005 (aged 96); Venice, Italy
Nationality	Slovenian
Field	painting, drawing, printmaking
Training	Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb
Movement	Neodvisni
Influenced by	Goya, Manet, Babić, Grohar
Awards	Grand Prize Venice Biennale (1956); Prešeren Award (1991)

Self-portrait (1997)

Zoran Mušič (February 12, 1909 — May 25, 2005) was a Slovenian painter. He spent half of his life living and working in Italy and France.

Life

Zoran Mušič was born in a Slovene-speaking family in Bukovica, a village in the Vipava Valley near Gorizia, in what was then the Austrian County of Gorizia and Gradisca (now in Slovenia). Mušič's father was headmaster of the local school, while his mother was a teacher there. Both parents were Slovenes from the Goriška region: his father was from the village of Šmartno in the Brda hills, while his mother was born in a small village Kostanjevica near Lig Kanal ob Soči.

During the Battles of the Isonzo, the family was forced to flee to Arnače near Velenje, where Zoran attended elementary school. In spring 1918, towards the end of World War I, the family moved back to Gorizia, but they were expulsed again in August 1919 by the Italian authorities that had occupied the region. They moved to Griffen in Carinthia, but were expelled once again by the Austrian authorities after the Carinthian Plebiscite in late October 1920. They finally settled in the Slovenian Styria, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.^{citation needed}

Mušič attended high schools in Maribor till 1928. Between 1930 and 1935 he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.

After graduation in 1934, he travelled extensively. He spent three months in Spain, mainly Madrid, he visited Vienna and Dalmatia several times while being based in Maribor and Hoče. In 1940, he moved to Ljubljana. During this period (1942), he painted several churches in his native Goriška region, together with his friend Avgust Černigoj (Drežnica, Grahovo). In October 1943, he moved to Venice and Trieste. In November 1944, he was arrested by the Nazi German forces and sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he made 200 sketches of life in the camp 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 September 1949 he married Ida Cadorin - Barbarigo there.

In 1950 he won the prize and in 1956 the Grand Prize for his Graphic work at the Venice Biennale. In 1951 he was awarded the Prix de Paris, (jointly with Antonio Corpora in 1951). 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.^{citation needed}

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 François Mitterrand and Milan Kučan.^{citation needed}

In 1991, Mušič was given the Prešeren Award for lifetime achievement, the highest decoration in the field of the arts in Slovenia.³ Some of Mušič's works have been featured at Piran Coastal Galleries.⁴

He died in Venice in 2005 at the age of 96. He is buried in the local St. Michele cemetery.