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My Life, My Collection
La Mia Vita, La Mia Collezione
Vittorio Meneghelli -
1915 - 2010
Brush Maker - Tribal
Art Collector - Runner - Dealer
My Life My
Collection - La Mia Vita La Mia Collezione
Vittorino
Meneghelli
Though sprinkled with West African fakes, this book abounds with
exciting field images, visions of
contemporary art and celebrates Vittorio's electrifying life. A number of noteworthy Southern African
artifacts are included. The selected images that follow, reflect what is for
us the best of the Meneghelli Collection's Southern African artifacts, an
area where we shared common interest.
An extract of the Book Launch:
My Life, My Collection - La Mia Vita, La Mia Collection at the SA National
Gallery by Professor Pippa Skotness (Daughter of renown artist Cecil
Skotness).
A Life Lived Through Art: Vittorio Meneghelli’s La Mia Vita, La Mia
Collezione
La Mia Vita, La Mia Collezione (My Life, My Collection) by Vittorio
Meneghelli is the record of a life lived through art. Meneghelli’s
collection – possibly one of the largest private collections of African and
Italian art in the world – is a record of the passionate and personal
impulses that drove his search to understand and describe his experience.
Leaving Italy after the Second World War, Meneghelli settled in Johannesburg
(where he opened the Totem Gallery in 1968) and began his travels ranging
across Africa.
Eschewing the commercial African art centres of Cairo and Cape Town for the
more remote areas of Gabon and Congo, Nigeria and Mali, Meneghelli collected
with tenacity and verve, viewing the collecting of art as a creative
endeavour in itself. As he has said: “I consider art to be rebellion. I
don’t want to know dogmas.”
Long before African art became fashionable in the galleries of Europe,
Meneghelli had begun to establish a comprehensive record of his experiences
of the aesthetic world of the African continent, its rich tradition of
artists and its diverse art forms.
Meneghelli’s vast collection of traditional and contemporary work continues
to grow on many fronts, running hand in hand with the patient work of
ordering, classifying, and selecting and reselecting of objects by a
connoisseur delighting in his chosen field of expertise.
The collection, populated with sculptures, masks, jewels, drums, paintings,
textiles, exotic and ethnographic objects, antiques and books, mirrors the
eclectic tastes of Meneghelli.
It shows extraordinary freedom from any defined fashions or trends, and he
never misses the chance to include objects that are ironic or humorous.
The works represented in this book have value not only through their
undoubted aesthetic qualities, but through the personal stories attached to
the discovery, the chase, the negotiation, and finally the coveted
acquisition of each piece.
These compelling stories are presented in the book in parallel Italian and
English texts.
Supplemented with essays by long-time friends, artists, and
fellow-academics, La Mia Vita, La Mia Collezione is a uniquely personal and
historical document, the result of decades of loving dedication to art and
the artistic impulse
More about Vittorio
Meneghelli
Vittorio Meneghelli was born in
Mirano in 1915 spending his school years in Venice. He was enchanted by the
art of Venice even though appalled by the supplications expected by the
Catholic Church.
As a young adult he became an accountant, left Venice and moved to Mestre.
There he met the lovely Paolina whom he married in 1941 on the shores of
Lake Garda.
Her family owned a broom and brush factory in Chirignago, for which the
catalogue from the early 19th century appears in the book.
Vittorio began a venture to make shoes, a great Italian tradition, and
during the last years of the war he made and traded the standard issue army
boot, travelling at night to evade machine guns from the Allied forces.
At this time Vittorio met the professor and sculptor Alberto Viani who would
be a friend and an enormous influence, and the reason he attributes his
inaugural interest in and love of the arts.
His home was host to many and a place of discussion and debate about art,
the ineptitude of gallery owners, the philistine behaviour of some Italian
collectors, the artists of Paris, and art objects were often exchanged for
food or shoes with the artists Vittorio admired.
 
At the same time his interest in African art was aroused in particular
because of its influence on French painting of the earlier part of the
century.
After the war Vittorio sold up the shoe factory and travelled to South
Africa with the thought of emigrating. He immediately loved the country and
wanted to succeed here.
His family joined him and though this new business did not thrive he
eventually set up a factory that would use hogs hair to create brushes.
This led in the end to the production of rope, a thriving factory 'Academy
Brushware' and new projects to make batik fabrics and dresses which Paolina
worked on and avante garde furniture.
It was in the later 1960s that Vittorino made his first trips through Africa
and launched Totem Meneghelli, an art gallery, in Johannesburg.
This was an historic moment in the cultural life of Johannesburg, for as
Karel Nel, who contributes a text to the book says, in Totem the
Meneghelli's exposed South Africans - both black and white to Africa's
cultural heritage, to its power and beauty and the contributions that the
art of this continent had already made in Europe.
It seems strange to think about it now, but then there was almost nothing of
Africa's creative life to be seen in the urban areas of South Africa and
very little elsewhere except, of course, in the great colonial museums in
Europe.
Today, Vittorino says there is probably more African art in the world now
than ever existed. An extraordinary thought.
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s the Meneghellis attracted a lively and generous
collection of artists, poets and others to their Sunday lunch table.
An artist himself, Vittorino worked directly with others such as Aileen
Lipkin and poet Sinclaire Beiles, and his friends included Cecil Skotnes,
Eduardo Villa, Lucy Sibiya, Norman Catherine and Tito Zungu, the latter
unknown then but well known now for the drawings of aeroplanes he made on
envelopes.
At Totem he exhibited both collections of art from the rest of Africa and
curated exhibitions of local artists -- indeed he was one of the very first
curators who understood the social and creative energy of curatorship and
generated lively projects in which many artists enthusiastically
participated.
All the while Vittorino continued travelling and buying art in West Africa.
There he made friends with merchants and traders in Mali, Cote d'Ivoire,
Togo, Congo, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Benin, Cameroon and elsewhere.
He became familiar with the markets in places such as Abidjan, Bamako,
Accra, Lome and Timbuktu. He has had an unerring eye for the pieces of
traditional mastery and beauty but also for finding wonderful forms of
contemporary innovation and quirky expressions of creativity.
His collection of Nok ceramic sculpture from the first millennium and Benin
brasses almost took my breath away when I saw them in his factory in
Johannesburg a few years ago.
The strings of beads he has located are deeply appealing, and resonant,
capable of revealing revised histories of Africa by tracing their
continental and global movements.
He collected brass and bronze beads in the most extraordinary shapes and
patterns, amber and resin beads, bone and tooth, glass and stone, shell and
ivory, and gold beads made and traded across Africa.
His other collections included European beads from Murano, resin beads
resembling amber imported from Germany and sold throughout the continent,
used as barter currency for spices, gold, ivory, timber and slaves to be
shipped to the Americas.
These have been tracked and traded, bought and brought to be strung in a
factory in Germiston by an Italian couple and worn by me, and my mother and
a thousand others who carry this history, of which Vittorino is a part,
unknowingly around their necks.
Price: $200.00
plus postage.
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