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A Life Lived Through Art: Vittorio Meneghelli’s La Mia Vita, La Mia Collezione now available at David Krut Bookstores

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essays by long-time friends, artists, and fellow-academics, La Mia Vita, La Mia Collezione is a uniquely personal and historical document, the result of decades of loving dedication to art and the artistic impulse.

 

 

Keywords: Africa, African Art, art collection, Arts-and-Culture, book review