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An Artist's Response to Evil: "We Are Not the Last" by Zoran Music, an exhibition of the work of the Austro-Hungarian-born artist Zoran Music, including acrylic paintings and watercolors created from 1970 to 1987, opens at The Jewish Museum on March 17 and remains on view through June 30, 2002. Internationally acclaimed, Music's work commands a particular authority in the context of the vital mixing of cultures and of the fearsome ethnic conflicts that have shaped and reshaped national boundaries in the Balkans. Combined with his personal experience as a political prisoner in Dachau, the artist's own geographic origins resulted in a profound empathy for victims of global strife, giving rise to the series of works he called We Are Not the Last (Nous ne sommes pas les derniers). This series of acrylic paintings and watercolors reinterprets drawings of the dead that Music had originally made during his two-year internment at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was sent after his arrest by the Gestapo for anti-German activity in Venice in 1944.

Zoran Music was born in 1909 in Gorizia, now in Italy, but then a town in the foothills of the Alps of Slovenia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the shifting frontier of East Central Europe, a geographic area pounded by war and ethnic conflict for most of the last century. Music chose the Holocaust as his subject many years after the fact as a form of protest, or warning, in the wake of the political upheavals of the late 1960s. The artist's figurative-Expressionist style is reminiscent of work from the 1950s by the Italian-American artist Rico Lebrun, whose paintings based on photographs of Holocaust victims were exhibited at The Jewish Museum in 1997. Like Lebrun, Music attempts to redeem the deaths of the victims through the tortured, yet transcendent figures depicted in his works.

Music evolved his figural works from landscapes he was creating in the immediate post-war period. His realistic depictions of the Dalmatian hills became freer and eventually darker and more sober renderings in which skeletons or skulls might be identified. Soon they were called burnt landscapes and by 1970, working from the drawings instead of the landscape, the corpses he had witnessed became the all-consuming subjects of his work.

The artist has said: "When we were in the camp, people would often declare that this sort of thing could never happen again. When the war is over, they said, a better world will come into being and such horrors will never recur. . . . But then, as time went by, I saw the same sort of thing starting to happen again all over the world – in Vietnam, in the Gulag, in Latin America – everywhere. And I realized that what we had said in those days – that we would be the last people to experience such things – was not true: the truth is that we were not the last."

All the works on view, except for a single self-portrait lent by Mrs. Leon Hess, are from the collection of Patti Cadby Birch, a prominent supporter of New York cultural institutions and a major collector of the works of Zoran Music, as well as other modernist artists. Music's work has been exhibited widely in Europe since 1948. In New York, his paintings have been included in shows at the Denise Cadé (2000) and Jan Krugier (1997) galleries. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1995 securing Music's reputation in Europe.

"Now – in the wake of the past decade's ongoing conflicts in the former Yugoslav republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, and in Kosovo, Rwanda, Chechnya, Afghanistan, as well as elsewhere – "We Are Not the Last" resounds anew as an awesome reminder of the human suffering that results from national, ethnic, and religious hatred," noted Susan Chevlowe, former Associate Curator at The Jewish Museum and curator of the exhibition.

An Artist's Response to Evil: "We Are Not the Last" by Zoran Music is made possible through major support given in honor of Evelyn G. Clyman by the Eugene M. and Emily Grant Foundation. Additional support has been provided by Fanya Gottesfeld Heller.