Antoni Zoran Music Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Anton Zoran Mušič (Bocaveza, 12 February 1909 – Venice, 25 May 2005) was a Slovenian painter and engraver, representative of the neo-Parisian school.

Mušič was born into a Slovenian-speaking family in the village of Boccavizza near Gorizia (then part of Gorizia and Gladiska counties), Australia (now Slovenia). After completing his studies at the Zagreb Academy of Arts in 1934, Music began his long journey (1935-1940), spending several months in Korčula, Madrid. Read the full biography

Antoni Zoran Music Biography

Anton Zoran Mušič (Bocaveza, 12 February 1909 – Venice, 25 May 2005) was a Slovenian painter and engraver, representative of the neo-Parisian school.

Mušič was born into a Slovenian-speaking family in the village of Boccavizza near Gorizia (then part of Gorizia and Gladiska counties), Australia (now Slovenia). After completing his studies at the Zagreb Academy of Arts in 1934, Music began his long journey (1935-1940), spending several months in Korčula, Madrid. Before settling in Trieste and Venice (1943), he lived in Maribor and Ljubljana, where he married Ida Barbarigo Cadorin, who he would consider his only muse in his life Goddess. In November 1944, during World War II, he was deported to the Dachau concentration camp, where he managed to covertly paint a picture of life in the camp under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions. Professor Music recently discovered 24 paintings signed by Music and dated Dachau in 1945 that bear witness to life and death in the concentration camps. Franco Cecotti of Trieste in the archives of ANPI, ANED, ANPPIA and the Regional Institute for the History of the Giulia Liberation Movement of Friuli Venezia. They are currently preserved at the Revoltella Museum in Trieste and represent the most evocative series of paintings by Mušič on the theme of expulsion

After the liberation in 1945, Musica returned to Ljubljana, from where he moved to Gorizia, Istria (Buzet) and Venice, where he won the Guarino Prize at the 1950 Biennale. In 1951 he received, together with the Italian painter Antonio Coppola, the Paris Prize organized in Cortina d'Ampezzo by the Italian Cultural Center of Paris on the advice of Campigli and Severini.

A new phase of his painting developed around the representation of the Dalmatian landscapes of his youth. Subsequently he focused mainly on the surrounding environment, the Italian landscape. His style was influenced by Venetian mosaics and Byzantine icons.

In the 1950s he worked for a time in Paris, learning French for "abstract lyricism" before returning to his studio in Venice. In 1956 and 1960 he took part in the Biennale again. After numerous awards for his graphic work, from the 1960s onwards, Mujic's organic models became increasingly abstract and his work abandoned the canon of three-dimensionality.

For a new series between 1970 and 1976, entitled We are not the last (French: Nous ne sommes pas les derniers), the artist transforms the horrors and hellish detention of the Dachau concentration camp into a universal tragedy, which was a huge success and obviously the most critically acclaimed.

Zoran Mušič's work has been awarded in numerous international exhibitions, and today his esteemed works are preserved in the most important museums in the world, mainly in Italy, Slovenia, France, Spain, Germany and the United States.

Mušič is also known by the nickname "Horse Painter" because his recurring theme is the horse.