Provenance: Private Collection, France

ABOUT THE WORK

Among the Filipino artists who have ventured across the world in the name of art and found a second home in their sojourns is Macario Vitalis. Macario Vitalis was born in 1898 in Lapog, Ilocos Sur. As a poor young adult, he left the Philippines for the United States in 1917 in an attempt to find a better life and to follow his artistic ambitions. He studied in San Francisco by day and provided for himself as an elevator boy at night. In 1924, Vitalis began his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He left the US in late 1926, settling in France. There, Vitalis studied at the Academie de Montmartre and set up his studio in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux. In Paris, he met influential modernist painters, including Pablo Picasso, creating works that depicted the ambiance of pre-war Parisian life. Having studied in Europe, and later finding home in Brittany sometime in 1957, Vitalis’ predilections were inevitably predisposed by European post-impressionist masters. The dynamic color palette, among the notable things in Vitalis’ stylistic evolution, has set his work apart from that of his contemporaries. Meld with his use of cubist impressionism, Vitalis executes his works elegantly—later venturing into various evolutions of the planar elements into pointillism.