Zoran Antonio Music 1909-2005

Acquired directly from the artist

Surface in good condition. Canvas not lined.
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'We are not the Last' (Lots 174-177)

 

Venice, 1944: Zoran Music was living and working there, he had an exhibition at the Piccola Galleria.  But later that year, he was arrested in a roundup by the Gestapo and transported to Dachau concentration camp.

Dachau was the first concentration camp created in Nazi Germany, in 1933; its function, to detain and interrogate political prisoners.  But by 1944, it contained gas chambers and crematoria and its role was mass extermination.  When Music entered the place, its inmates were either dying or dead; the dead now too many to be cremated, their bodies stacked in piles all around, their numbers swelling with each dawn as more fell victim to starvation, cold, disease and other calamities.  For the guards, the war was lost and they abandoned their duties, making the camp even more of a Dystopia.
'We lived in a world that was beyond all imagining' he recalled.  Amid these horrors, Music struggled to sustain both his body and his spirit.  So, he drew: scrounging for pencil, charcoal and paper amid the chaos.  He documented his world, its skeletal inmates, their hollowed eye sockets, the stacks of bodies.

Dachau was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945; Music returned to Venice and resumed his career.  The experience of the camp was seared into his memory but for a long time he declined to recollect it and it informed his art only metaphysically: his paintings of the craggy hills of Dalmatia with their protruding boulders, which he painted over and over, were inspired by the piles of bodies in Dachau.  He explained this to no-one.

Yet in 1969 he suddenly began to engage in a project, utilizing all the media in his arsenal, which directly confronted and articulated these horrific memories.  Developing the sketches he had preserved from his internment, he produced, in watercolors and then canvases in increasing sizes, a succession of depictions of the victims' bodies, focusing on their faces frozen in agony.  Some are of one figure but mostly the paintings repeat the motif of piled bodies in unnumbered masses.  He titled the series 'Nous ne sommes pas les derniers', a remark he had once made to a fellow inmate who had observed that if there could be any consolation to their suffering, it was that once it was at last made known, this could never happen again.

Music started to exhibit the works under this title as early as 1971 and they were the subject of numerous articles in many countries, including West Germany.  They were universally recognized as a profound and moving chronicle from a unique point of view.  Several canvases entered European museum collections.  However the biggest collectors of these works were his friends and patrons Everett B. and Patti Birch.  A catalogue of the collection, We are not the Last, with essays by Michael Gibson and Jean Clair, was privately published by them in 1988.  This collection is now part of the Estate of Patti Birch.