What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part I

Born in Gorizia, Zoran Mušič is regarded as Slovene, Yugoslavian, and Italian, and is widely considered the first Slovenian modernist artist to achieve Western recognition. While he thought of himself as being “of no fixed abode, Paysage, painted by Mušič in 1958 is almost certainly a Dalmatian landscape and directly relates to similar themed paintings the artist created between 1948 and 1969. From 1935-1940, the artist resided in Dalmatia, a region of Croatia located along the Eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea and its inland regions, and he spoke fondly of the Karst region, situated between the Gulf of Trieste, Istria, the Brkini Hills, and the Vipava Valley, saying “the karst is the matrix of my painting.” Mušič was so moved by the colors and topography of the Dalmatian coast, he described it as an “obsession.” In some of the artist’s Dalmatian paintings, horses and vegetation, softened, blurred, and obscured, are featured within an expansive vista, and in others, such as the present work, the Dalmatian “landscape” is alluded to more than it is actually physically depicted, appearing in the form of hazy, non-representational enlarged spots worked in earthen tones of brown, mauve, and white, and arranged in patterns, resulting in a sort of haunting, mesmerizing “lyrical abstraction."