Zoran Music - Archivio Barbarigo Cadorin Music

Zoran Music

TIMELINE

1909

Anton Zoran Music was born on 12 February in Bukovica, near Gorizia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now Slovenia.

I was born in Gorizia and I used to go to my grandparents’ home in the Collio. Of that land I remember the hills that overlooked the plain, an immense plain, in which I liked to lose my gaze, sitting on the little wall of the house. […] My grandparents were great wine producers, my mother was a teacher, my father was a teacher. I have rather distant images of that time: I remember that my father was a quiet, amiable person. […] It was my mother who decided. She had a lightning gaze, able to paralyse one.

The artist in conversation with Paolo Levi, in Zoran Music Dialogo con l’autoritratto, Electa Milan 1992, p.44.

1915

At the outbreak of war, his father, a schoolmaster, was at the front, in Galicia; the family moved to Styria.

We were refugees in a small village in Styria. During the First World War, my father was sent to the front and my mother was left alone with two sons, Ljuban and myself. We lived in a hut with a thatched roof. The school was quite far away and woe betide if you were late. The teacher invariably pointed his finger at me every morning after the Pater noster. It was my turn to recite the Habsburg anthem, then taken up in chorus by the whole school group.

The artist in conversation with Paolo Levi, in Zoran Music Dialogo con l’autoritratto, Electa Milan 1992, p.45.

1930-35

archivio barbarigo cadorin music — *Polje* (Field), c.1935, oil on canvas 54 × 64 cm, Umetnostna Galerija Maribor.

He studies in Zagreb, at the Academy of Fine Arts.

1935-36

After graduation, on the advice of his teacher Lubjo Babić he undertook a study trip to Spain (Madrid, Toledo). When the Civil War broke out, he left the country.

Spain at that time was still a distant country, almost unreachable for a student. Throughout the year I spent whole days at the Prado, copying Goya and El Greco. My stay in Toledo lasted three weeks and the landscape of Castile awakened in me the memory of my Dalmatian homeland. But in 1936 I left Spain. The civil war had just begun. I returned to Dalmatia, to Curzola, seduced by that stony landscape, where every now and then a tiny oasis of red earth with a vineyard or purple lavender bushes sprout between the walls.

The artist in conversation with Paolo Levi, in Zoran Music Dialogo con l’autoritratto, Electa Milan 1992, p.45.

1936-42

Long stays in Dalmatia; he exhibits in Zagreb and Ljubljana. Mural paintings in several churches in Friuli.

1943

He exhibits in Trieste, at the Galleria d’Arte al Corso. In autumn he is in Venice, where he meets Guido Cadorin. Donne al Mercato, Lattaie con asinelli (Women at the market, Milkmaids with donkeys), Venetian landscapes and interiors…

1944

In spring, his first meeting with Ida Cadorin, in Trieste. He lives in Venice and here he exhibits at Roberto Nonveiller’s Piccola Galleria: a monograph with an introduction by Filippo De Pisis is published for the occasion. In October, he is arrested by the Gestapo, due to his relations with exponents of the Resistance. Imprisoned in Trieste, he refuses to collaborate and is deported to Dachau.

The concentration camp was my great school of solitude. It taught me not to be afraid, to be alone, even in the midst of a thousand people. […] After Dachau something broke in me. Before, I had many certainties: suddenly I lost them, and I realised that there is only emptiness around us. I am not a hero. I was only a young painter, and for me the world still shone with magnificent colours. In Dachau, I grasped reality, and I understood what it means to get down to the essentials.

The artist in conversation with Paolo Levi, in Zoran Music Dialogo con l’autoritratto, Electa Milan 1992, p.46.

1945

At the end of April, the camp is liberated by the Americans. He returns to Gorizia and then to Venice, taking with him a group of drawings executed secretly during his deportation. He finds Ida Cadorin again who, a student at the Accademia, lends him her studio. He resumes painting.

1946

He collaborates with Guido Cadorin on the frescoes in the church in Cadola, near Belluno (assisted by Ida Cadorin and Sylva Bernt). He exhibits in Trieste and in the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice; this is a period of intense activity, inspired also by the lagoon atmosphere.

In this immense light I suddenly discovered the gold of San Marco. I have the impression that something is being revealed to me that was buried in distant memory. […] I feel as if I had already lived in another life among the arabesques of the Orient. At the Zattere I live the happiest of days. If only these watercolours could be the first drops from a spring of fresh water!

The artist, October 1946; quoted in Mazzariol, Music. Electa, Milan 1980, p.38

1948

He has a studio in the attic of Palazzo Pisani in Venice, home of the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory. He visits Zurich several times, where he exhibits at the Galérie Chichio Haller; first participation at the Venice Biennale and the Quadriennale in Rome. In Rome he begins exhibiting at the Galleria dell’Obelisco. The hills he glimpses from the train on his travels to Rome suggest the cycle of Sienese Landscapes.

1949

On 29 September, he marries Ida Cadorin in Venice. For the occasion, the two artists produce an etching, engraved by two hands, announcing the event. He exhibits at the Galérie Georges Moos in April (plaquette with texts by Cipriano Efisio Oppo, P. A. Quarantotti Gambini, Sergio Solmi, Diego Valeri).

1950

He painted a ‘Stanza’ (Room) for the Dornacher sisters in the basement of a villa in Zollikon, near Zurich, with the collaboration of Paolo Cadorin, Ida’s brother, who is working in Switzerland as a restorer.

1951

He finishes the large tapestry with the Stories of Marco Polo for the ocean liner Augustus; the work is published with an extensive photo report in the magazine ‘Domus’, edited by Gio Ponti. He wins the ‘Premio Parigi’ in Cortina d’Ampezzo (ex aequo with Antonio Corpora).

1952

Thanks to the ‘Premio Parigi’, he exhibits at Gildo Caputo’s Galerie de France, the first of a long series of solo exhibitions at this gallery. The contract enables him to settle in the French capital, while continuing to live and work in Venice.

1953-1954

New studio in Venice, near the Accademia. In Paris, he installs himself in Montparnasse, at 16 Rue du Saint Gothard, in the studio that was once Brassaï’s. Exhibition in New York, at the Cadby Birch Gallery.

1955

Monograph published by Obelisk, text by René de Solier. He exhibits at ‘documenta’, Kassel.

1956

Grand Prize for Graphic Art at the Venice Biennale. The following year, again for prints, he wins a prize at the Ljubljana Biennale.

1958

He exhibits the Terre Dalmate (Dalmatian lands) cycle at the Galérie de France.

1959

He leaves his studio in Montparnasse and takes up residence at 73 Rue des Vignes, in the former studio of his friend Léon Gischia.

1960

Unesco Prize at the Venice Biennale, solo exhibition at the Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale.

1961

He spends some time in Cortina and starts the Fiori a Cortina cycle. Exhibition at Lorenzelli in Milan. Throughout the decade, series of exhibitions in numerous museums in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Yugoslavia.

1962

Retrospective of graphic art in Braunschweig (Staedtisches Museum). On this occasion, Rolf Schmücking publishes the first edition of the catalogue raisonné of the graphic works.

1968

He is appointed Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.

1970

Beginning of the Nous ne sommes pas les derniers cycle, first exhibited at the Galerie de France and later in Munich (Neue Staatsgalerie im Haus der Kunst, 1971) and Brussels (Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1972). The artist speaks of it as a sort of ‘new beginning’ after a period of crisis:

After a few years, in Paris, I experienced a crisis in my work and around me there was nothing but abstract painting. I began to feel useless, weak, outside this great current to which all the famous artists and important critics belonged. So I ended up changing my path. I tried in my own way to do abstract painting. And in this attempt, I completely lost my personal truth. This is the worst thing that can happen to an artist, because without this truth he does not exist. And it is out of this confusion, out of this frustration, that the corpses came out.

From Michael Peppiatt, Zoran Music Entretiens 1988-1998, L’Échoppe, 2000

1972

He begins the Motivo vegetale series

1974

Solo exhibition in Venice, at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia.

1977

Major show in Darmstadt. Further solo exhibitions in Oslo and Basel.

1980

Exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Monograph with text by Giuseppe Mazzariol. He begins new painting cycles in these years: Canale della Giudecca (from 1980), Punta della Dogana (from 1981), L’Atelier (from 1983).

1984

He begins the Cattedrali (Cathedrals) series. The Venice Biennale dedicates a solo room to him.

1985

Major show curated by Giuseppe Mazzariol, at the Museo Correr, Venice.

1986

Retrospective at Museo Jenisch, Vevey, Switzerland, curated by Bernard Blatter.

1988

Exhibition of works on paper at the Centre Pompidou, curated by Jean Clair. Beginning of the cycle of large Autoritratti (Self-Portraits) and the Ateliers.

1991

Appointed Officier de la Légion d’Honneur.

1993

Exhibition at the French Academy in Rome and the Palazzo Reale in Milan (curated by Jean Clair). Retrospective of work on paper at the Albertina, Vienna. Also exhibited at the Jan Krugier Gallery in New York (text in catalogue by James Lord)

1994

‘Zoran Music: el hombre sin territorio’, exhibition in Valencia, Centro Cultural Bancaixa.

1995

Major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, curated by Jean Clair. ‘Identità Alterità’ exhibition at Palazzo Grassi, coinciding with the ‘Centenary Biennial’, again curated by Jean Clair.

1998

Exhibition at the Museo Morandi in Bologna, dedicated to the watercolours of his early Venetian years. The following year, in Bilbao, an exhibition on recent works (Figures, Self-portraits and Double Portraits), curated by Kosme de Barañano. In 1999, a second exhibition at the Museo Morandi in Bologna featured a corpus of forty-six works on paper donated by the artist to the museum.

2002

Exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Arts (Norwich) and the Estorik Collection of Modern Italian Art (London). The following year, a donation of over fifty works to IVAM (Valencia), where a major exhibition is held.

2003

Major retrospective at Palazzo Attems, Gorizia, curated by Marco Goldin.

2005

On 25 May he dies in Venice, at his home in San Vio.