Zoran Musić, 1909-2005

The painter Zoran Musić was born in Gorizia, a provincial town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that today is part of Italy. He spent several years in Austria as a teenager before enrolling in the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He spent time in Spain and Dalmatia before World War II and was deported as a political prisoner to Dachau in 1944. That experience -- he drew restlessly, and in secret, what he witnessed -- would come to dominate his work in the late 1960s, when his Dalmatian landscapes began morphing into skulls and corpses. After liberation, he settled in Venice and later had a second studio in Paris.

He died Wednesday in Venice.

In 2002, the Jewish Museum in New York showed a small selection from his work, a reinterpretation of his Dachau pictures. For additional biographical information, click here.