Giovanna Dal Bon

"Each became absorbed in their own artistic universe, in ways that gradually acquired consistency and weight over the years. Art animated their lives, an inexorable imperative. Painting was the sole, intimate necessity for both, perhaps the only real secret of their indissoluble bond."

This volume is a double portrait of painters Zoran Mušič and Ida Barbarigo, depicting them from their first meeting in Trieste in spring 1944 until Mušič’s death in 2005. He was a Slovenian, born on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a family of vintners, in a town whose name means a small hill. In 1944 he was over 30 and had already been to Venice and met Ida’s father, the painter Guido Cadorin (famous for the panels in the “Room of Pure Dreams” at D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale) by whom he was immediately fascinated. Ida was 20, she had always painted, and was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. She was descended from the Cadorin, originally from Cadore, who owned one of the oldest sculpture workshops in Venice. Zoran’s exhibition in Trieste left her unimpressed and she was not at all attracted to the reserved young artist with kind eyes. But their lives, whose most significant moments are described on these pages, were destined to be forever intertwined: from their first meeting in Trieste to Mušič’s deportation to Dachau; from his return to Venice in a state of exhaustion, to his courting and then marrying Ida in 1949; from the early years of married life in Venice, a crossroads for many artists – Arturo Martini, Virgilio Guidi, de Chirico, De Pisis, Campigli – to the Paris period and the friendships, acquaintances, and relations with the Galerie de France.   Two lives devoted to painting and narrated in this book through a hundred unpublished photographs from the period.