Zoran Mušič painted a series of color watercolors depicting Venetian views between 1947 and 1949, after returning to Venice following the traumatic experience of internment at Dachau. He was taken under the wing of the painter and respected professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Guido Cadorin, and his daughter Ida, who later became Mušič’s life partner. Ida, herself a painter, temporarily gave him the use of her studio, and he was finally able to relax and paint in peace. He wrote: “At last light, sun—everywhere around. … Is it really true that no one is watching me?”
Using a color palette unusually vibrant for him, he painted Venetian canals, boats, and cityscapes in watercolor. These are seemingly modest, experimental works in which he asks himself whether he still knows how to use color, as if testing whether his painter’s hand still follows his inner feeling. Each day he painted a new vision of a city view. He adorned the edges of the images with painted frames that function as safeguards for their fragile interior. The watercolor technique helped him achieve the impression of a translucent vision of Venetian canals and boats.
In the collection of Ljuban, Milada, and Vanda Mušič, views of canals with boats have been preserved, as well as depictions of St. Mark’s Square and the Rialto Bridge, where on the terrace of a café by the canal one can also glimpse the painter’s self-portrait.