NEW YORK.- The Jewish Museum presents "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 This series of acrylic paintings and watercolors reinterprets drawings of the dead that Music had originally made during his two-year internment at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was sent after his arrest by the Gestapo for anti-German activity in Venice in 1944.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.