Zoran Music assesses Zoran Music
Antonio Zoran Music painted this self-portrait in 1997, when he was 82 years old. He is to be forgiven for its gloom, of course. Not only did he copy El Greco and Goya in his youth, and not only was he nearly blind by 1997, he had spent the last year of World War II in Dachau.
In the concentration camp, before the Allies brought back the light, Music made 100 sketches of the barbed death around him, managing to keep his documentation hidden from the guards and the Gestapo.
Music was a Slovenian, born in 1909 on the Italian border. When he died in 2005 he was on the other side, in Venice, the scene of his greatest triumph — the Grand Prize for engraving at the 1956 Biennial.
There are many landscapes in his oeuvre, and a celebrated series on vegetables, and in 1970 Music returned to the horrific memories of Dachau in a collection called “We Are Not the Last”, but I doubt there’s anything as riveting as this self-contemplation.
