Macario Vitalis left the US in late 1926 and then settled in France where he studied at the Academie de Montmartre and set up his studio in the Paris suburb of Puteaux. In time, he met painters like Pablo Picasso no less, thus his stay in France might as well be the capstone to his education, a leisurely initiation which provided an opportunity to broaden his horizons, to learn new cultures, to hone his personal taste.
Macario Vitalis’ earliest works date back to the 1930s, capturing the atmosphere of the French antebellum.
The still life was done in 1942. Drawing from Post-Impressionism with its concern for structure, the floral still-life is characterized by its clarity and purity of shape, the vivid hues, and the interaction of the varicolored flowers with each other and the background.
In the 1950s he settled in Brittany where he created a series of Breton townscapes that also featured Post-Impressionist color schemes.
In the two works Vitalis painted in a style that preceded his prismatic style, with cool blues predominating in a delicate balance with warm yellows and oranges dissolved throughout. The artist’s concern is not of genre as such but in executing the visual potential of the subjects into a pleasant orchestration of colors and tones in a painting. Both the townscape and the vase of flowers go beyond mere pictorial qualities to create a total sensuous situation of color and texture in a resulting in a synthesis of the senses. Later in his life prismatism was to appear, replacing his realist style, yet the celebratory elan is consistent in his works across the decades.
The paintings shows the influence of impressionism, although subsequently, his work was to become more prismatic.
In 1975, he was declared "the only honorary citizen" of Plestin-les-Greves, Brittany where he had originally settled.
Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Paris