There are many who find the surrealists’ preoccupation with political questions to be “unpoetic” and inconsistent with the “freedom” of the artist—to which we can reply only that such critics have understood nothing of poetry nor of freedom.

—Franklin Rosemont^[1]

Knowing that the third iteration of the Modern Series—dedicated entirely to the work of pioneering Mozambican artist Malangatana Ngwenya—would be on view in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute, we set two primary curatorial goals for ourselves: first, to introduce audiences to his stunning and stylistically diverse early pieces; and second, to expand our public’s conception of modern art. While most of the museum’s audiences are bound to be familiar with European modernists such as Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, whose paintings and sculptures are on permanent display in our Modern Art galleries, we hoped to convey the multiplicity of modern art movements by focusing on the conditions and contexts of such art’s emergence on the continent of Africa and, more specifically, within Mozambique. Research trips to both Mozambique and Portugal enabled me to see many of Malangatana’s paintings in person, and I found one particularly compelling—The Secret Voyage (A viagem secreta) (fig. 1). Painted like a soft nightmare in red, orange, and blue hues, the work depicts land and sea, amorphous figures, a skeletal person, and floating faces. In the middle ground a globular red figure stands with his right arm outstretched, his open-palmed hand in front of a man’s head. This is said to be a depiction of Malangatana’s friend and patron, the renowned modern architect Amâncio d’Alpoim Miranda “Pancho” Guedes; in the front right corner is another portrait, this time of Guedes’s wife, Dori.^[2] They are barely recognizable, their features distorted to match those of other semi-human beings in the work that are without known or identifiable models. The ghoulish blue figures, small creatures, and unnatural postures are all recurring features in Malangatana’s work. But the particular composition of this painting makes it stand out within his oeuvre for its formal alignment with surrealism, the literary and visual art movement that originated in Paris in the 1920s and, as developed by subsequent generations of adherents, unites unconscious dreams, imagination, and elements of reality to evoke a more complete reality or “surreality.” The visual hallmarks of surrealist art include uncanny juxtapositions of people and objects in dreamlike environments and the evocation of personal mythologies—all elements that are present within The Secret Voyage. Since our museum audiences are likely to have some prior knowledge of surrealism, I’ve contemplated: What was Malangatana’s relationship to the movement? And how do the local and international networks that he exhibited within—surrealist and otherwise—enlarge our understanding of him as a modern artist? A more expansive understanding of surrealism’s revolutionary impulse, visual forms, and adherents across geographies is generative in reading the impact of Malangatana’s work.1

Malangatana never explicitly identified as a surrealist. Furthermore, some interpretations of his work by his contemporaries and the media aim to suggest that he was doing something greater. South African architect Julian Beinart wrote in a brief biography, “Malangatana had his own brand of surrealism. It has little to do with the intellectual games of Western European surrealist painters. It is a plastic interpretation of a way of life in which mysticism and fantasy play a significant functional role.”^[3] Similarly, the Morning Post’s review of the artist’s exhibition in Nigeria in June 1962 states, “In Europe one would feel inclined to call Malangatana a SURREALIST. But such a classification would miss the point. Malangatana is a visionary.”^[4] I do not claim that Malangatana was a surrealist, but I do think it is relevant that European surrealist practice, and its formal aspects in particular, were a routine point of comparison. It is worth considering that from its beginnings, surrealism was an anti-imperialist movement that took inspiration from and included African and Afro-diasporic peoples.^[5] This was evidenced as early as 1925 in Paris, when fifty individuals, including the surrealist poets Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault—seeking to be revolutionary in their function and outlook, in contrast with other avant-garde movements—signed and published a political declaration: “La Révolution d’abord et toujours [Revolution Now and Forever]” in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution). The declaration took a pro-African and anti-colonial stance by voicing support for political and military leader Abd al-Karīm al-Khaṭṭābī and the Riffian people of Morocco, who were battling against Spanish and French rule.^[6]2

Surrealism quickly grew to encompass artists from around the world.^[7] A few examples of international participation include the Arte et Liberté group in Cairo in the 1930s; the surrealist group of Lisbon that emerged in the 1940s; and the literary magazine Tropiques, published on the island of Martinique from 1941 to 1945. Tropiques espoused the ideology and literature of Négritude (a philosophy focused on the affirmation of black people) in conjunction with the poetics of surrealism to uplift Caribbean culture. By the 1960s a surrealist movement had even emerged in Chicago, led in part by the American poet, artist, and historian Franklin Rosemont. The Chicago surrealists were keenly influenced by surrealists in Paris and by black writers such as C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, as well as America’s civil rights movement.^[8] Surrealists in Chicago were also in dialogue with those in Lisbon and Négritude influenced surrealism in Paris, so each manifestation of surrealism was far from being a derivative of what emerged in Paris; rather, all of these movements and their tenets were informed by transnational exchange. Furthermore, the revolutionary aims of surrealism, which bring form and politics together, resonate across time and space. We can draw a line from Dalí’s Inventions of the Monsters (fig. 2), which merges a desert landscape with animals aflame, distorted bodies, and monstrous apparitions (allegorical references to the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39), to Malangatana’s paintings of the 1960s and early 1970s. Their contorted bodies, monsters, spirits, and blood express the surreality of the psychic and physical violence of the colonial situation. The global appeal and circulation of surrealist principles enabled the movement’s enduring influence.3

Big Monsters Devouring Small Monsters (Monstros grandes devorando monstros pequenos), a painting from 1961 (fig. 3), exemplifies what many have come to recognize as Malangatana’s signature style, including its surrealist elements as well as political critique or even allegory. The painting is an airless, crowded composition of vibrantly colored monsters that are stacked upon each other and crisscross the picture plane. Their fang-like teeth draw long drips of red blood. Although this work is a visual departure from the uncanny, soft-toned dreamscape of The Secret Voyage, the artist retained a surrealist quality in these biomorphic, childlike forms. His monsters and spirits have been read as enigmatic evocations of the folklore of the Ronga culture in which he was born and raised while also being powerfully associated with imagination and the subconscious.^[9] Decades after making this painting, Malangatana explained that at the time, he didn’t dare boldly comment on the colonial situation as he did in later works, like 25 of September II (25 de Setembro II), painted in 1968 (fig. 4). He preferred to depict people as monsters because (in his view) all people are monsters, and this painting also represents “the whole colonial situation” as a “huge monster … that devoured the little monsters.”^[10] Big Monsters Devouring Small Monsters exemplifies the reality that Malangatana’s art and life were heavily marked by Mozambique’s anti-colonial struggle, the armed resistance waged by the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), the transition from Portuguese colonial rule to independence in 1975, and the subsequent establishment of the new nation. Liberation struggles that have spurred new national cultures were made manifest through visual arts and coincided with the emergence of modern art in many African countries, including Mozambique. Surrealism provides us with a formal and political framework for understanding this effect on his art.^[11]4

Big Monsters Devouring Small Monsters also helps us understand the international networks, surrealist and otherwise, in which Malangatana’s work circulated. The painting appeared in an exhibition at the First International Congress of African Culture (ICAC) at the Rhodes National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), in 1962; it is clearly visible in an installation photograph (fig. 5), and it is one of six paintings that Malangatana had on display.^[12] Organized by the National Gallery’s director, Frank McEwen, the ICAC sought to surface African cultures’ influence on the development of Western civilization’s art and music in the first half of the twentieth century. The ICAC was the first event of its kind in many ways, bringing together a multiracial group of scholars, architects, archaeologists, and curators to think across media about the influence of African cultural production, in a public forum.^[13] It is no coincidence that just as transnational exchange—here, the influence of African arts and culture on European and American arts and culture—was being recognized as a defining aspect of modernist movements, Malangatana’s paintings were included in this important display.5

As a forum of international delegates recognizing African art’s influence upon and connection to Western art, the ICAC was a precursor to a constellation of events celebrating and promoting black identities and pan-African cultural production that took place on the African continent between 1962 and 1982. This surge of activity had important effects on the visibility and prominence of modern and contemporary African artists.^[14] ICAC attendees played a direct role in cultivating exhibition and publication opportunities for modern artists and writers including Malangatana. One such delegate was Ulli Beier, a German-born, Nigeria-based scholar, editor, and founder of Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature (fig. 6). The publication brought together art, criticism, literature, fiction, and poetry from emerging—and ultimately influential—writers from English-, French-, Portuguese-, and Spanish-speaking countries across Africa and the Americas, such as Martinican poet, politician, and surrealist Aimé Césaire; American novelist and playwright Langston Hughes; and Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor. In addition to publishing Malangatana’s poetry and reproductions of his paintings in Black Orpheus No. 10, Beier provided the artist with his first solo exhibition abroad.^[15] Furthermore, following the ICAC conference, attendee Roland Penrose, himself a surrealist artist and then chairman and co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, organized the 1963 exhibition 2 Painters from Africa: Salahi and Malangatana, in which Malangatana’s work was shown alongside that of Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi. The ICAC thus reinforced and expanded international networks of modernist artistic exchange and display and fostered further circulation of Malangatana’s artwork. Like many of his contemporaries, Malangatana contributed to exhibitions across the African continent during the 1960s and early 1970s. Portuguese surrealist painter and poet Artur Manuel Rodrigues do Cruzeiro Seixas, for instance, appreciated his work. While based in Angola from 1951 to 1965, Cruzeiro Seixas was employed at the Museum of Angola in Luanda, and in 1953 he curated the first surrealist exhibition in an African country south of the Sahara Desert; a decade later he included a large painting by Malangatana in a group show.^[16] Cruzeiro Seixas and Malangatana were both contributors to the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition, which was titled Marvelous Freedom; Vigilance of Desire and held at Gallery Black Swan in Chicago.^[17] It was—to date—the largest and (in terms of participants) blackest surrealist exhibition in the world, showcasing more than five hundred works by one hundred and thirty artists from thirty countries, such as American painter and jazz musician Ted Joans and Cuban painter Wifredo Lam; it also included improvisational jazz performances by the Sun Song Ensemble.^[18] The viewers of such exhibitions and publications could see Malangatana’s art in a complementary relationship with that of visual artists, poets, and writers who were pushing a black emancipatory politics in different parts of the globe. As one of just a few black artists from Lusophone Africa to have such paintings on display in centers of artistic activity in Africa, Europe, and the United States, Malangatana further cemented his status as a pioneering modernist.6

Malangatana’s prominence in Mozambique is not based on his reception abroad or solely a response to the ideas communicated through his art but is in large part due to his strong civic role in the country’s recent history. This was a continuation of his work as an artist, though, and can be interpreted as consistent with early surrealist principles of being revolutionary in one’s actions. Malangatana was deeply embedded in the intellectual and artistic milieu of Mozambique’s capital city prior to the country’s independence, and was a known persona to FRELIMO. By 1961 Malangatana had been introduced to the organization’s founding president, Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, who encouraged him to remain in Mozambique and use his art to contribute to the liberation struggle.^[19] After Mozambique achieved independence in 1975, FRELIMO explicitly positioned arts and culture as part of broader efforts to manifest the values of the newly independent socialist state by promoting popular revolutionary art by and for the people.^[20] Malangatana’s work was included in group exhibitions that brought together both modern artists and those working in more traditional media such as sculpture and craft. He was commissioned to produce murals at the Ministry of Agriculture (in collaboration with Chilean artist Moira Lavanderos de Tohá), the Natural History Museum, and Heroes Square, all sites in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo).^[21] The artist was also put to work as a civil servant. In 1978 he was sent to Nampula province, in northern Mozambique, to organize communal villages and work groups among farmers for two years. It was only upon his subsequent return to Maputo that he re-engaged in painting full time. In the 1980s he also acted as director of the state’s Craft Department, where he organized craft cooperatives and contributed to the development of the National Museum of Art.^[22] At the conclusion of the country’s fifteen-year civil war, Malangatana was a signatory on the 1992 peace accord and in 1997 was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace. When he traveled and shared his artwork, he often took the opportunity to connect it to his social concerns. In a lecture that he gave at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989, he discussed his desire to be known as both a painter and a poet, his wish to be seen alongside artists from around the world, his sense of connection to all of humanity, and his compulsion to paint the human landscape with its pains and problems.^[23] The continuity between his words, civic actions, and art becomes not just explicable but almost inevitable when we place them within the context of surrealist art movements and associated exhibitions during his lifetime and consider the full history of visual and political affinities between Malangatana and surrealism.7

The Cry for Freedom (fig. 7) was one of the final works audiences encountered as they walked through Malangatana: Mozambique Modern. As part of the exhibition’s physical and chronological conclusion, the painting points to Malangatana’s broader role in Mozambique and his life after 1975. Painted in 1973, The Cry for Freedom is nearly six feet wide, its scale and content anticipating the murals he later painted in Maputo. The composition exemplifies Malangatana’s style with its dense entanglement of human, animal, and monstrous forms that appear to draw from both reality and worlds beyond. Elongated and twisted creatures sweep upward in a crescendo across the painting, with a faint indication of architectural features in the background. The vividly colored and tightly packed figures create a sense of tension so that the painting itself evokes the chaos, trepidation, and hope entailed by the struggle for liberation. An inscription on the back more literally reminds us of his personal politics; it identifies the work as paying homage to two Pan-African thinkers and revolutionaries: Amílcar Cabral, leader of the liberation movements in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and Mondlane.^[24] Malangatana’s art and politics intertwine and so, as critical as it is to situate him as a modern African artist, in the course of doing so it is important to recognize his profound contributions and engagements with black diasporic art practices as well as with international anti-colonial and anti-imperial art practices that were equally part of this history.8