Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2008

(Introduction to the article by Herbert M. Cole)

The Italian-born South African collector and businessman, Vittorio Meneghelli, now in his ninety-fourth year, is a man of considerable charm, wit, and intelligence. He recently published a memoir, My Life, My Collection, which highlights his vast collection of modern Italian, traditional African, and modern South African art. Richly illustrated, the book runs to 460 pages and also chronicles Meneghelli's early years as an artist, then as a collector of modern Italian painting and sculpture, and his friendships with such luminaries of the 1940s as Afro Basaldella, Alberto Viani, and Giuseppe Santomaso. It goes on to discuss his emigration to South Africa in 1950, his founding of several businesses, and the development of his interest in african art, especially great sculpture, which was then notably absent from South Africa.
In 1968, this interest led Meneghelli on his first collecting trip to Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, and Ghana. Later that year, he founded Totem Galleries, first with one and eventually four locations, the most recent being in Venice. For many years he was the pioneering sole purveyor of traditional African art in South Africa, as well as one of the very few avid collectors in that country. In the forty years since his initial buying venture, he has made seventy-two more trips, mostly to West Africa but also to Cameroon, Gabon, and the Congo. He has also collected extensively among the various peoples of South Africa itself, both to amass stock for his retail galleries and to set aside pieces for his personal collection, the bulk of which has been in Italy for more than a decade. A creative entrepreneur, Meneghelli has also been something of a maverick, and he has never hesitated to chart his own course, both by personal preference and by necessity during the years of apartheid. Over time, he established personal and business relationships with a host of West African art dealers, who, during the height of apartheid, often had to send his purchases to Italy before he could bring them back to his home in South Africa. As South African artist/author Karel Nel puts it, "Meneghelli thus occupied a strange and rather paradoxical position; he celebrated the work of the continent in a part of that continent which most denigrated the values of Africa; he had to find ingenious ways to bring valuable pieces from elsewhere to the pariah state in the south, and he did this with an unflagging sense of the importance and value of what he was doing."

The publication of Meneghelli's memoir and a recent exhibition in Venice of part of his African art collection have brought his life and career into the public eye. Rather than reiterating what has already been expressed about his vast and varied collection, I have chosen to highlight a segment of his Yoruba art collection, which is of particular interest by virtue of its aesthetic quality and historical importance. All of the pieces shown herre are currently housed in Italy and appear in Meneghelli's recent book. None were published in his earlier and controversial book, Nigerian Art: The Meneghelli Collection (Johannesburg, 2002). The Yoruba works shown here are perhaps the cream but, to change metaphors, they are but the tip of the Meneghelli Yoruba iceberg, as his collection contains examples of virtually all Yoruba object types, including more than two hundred ibeji, as well as encyclopedic accumulations of beadwork, Shango staffs, and other object types not represented in this article. There is variation in the quality of these objects, but together they represent a highly educational cross-section of the material that was available in West Africa in the post-colonial period during which Meneghelli was collecting. They also provide an opportunity to muse on the various aspects of Yoruba art and culture that they represent.