BY DR TONY M. MONDA
Much of Zimbabwean indigenous culture reveals insights to human and ecological nature. Most of the ‘First Generation’ of Zimbabwean stone sculptors worked intuitively within the realm of a moralistic and idealistic socio-cultural framework.
Visualizations of oral descriptions of the world and African ontology provided the bulk of the subject matter for the senior stone artists in the country, and Henry Munyaradzi was no exception.
He was able to articulate these Shona cultural concepts, mores and ideas in an optical sense in the mother tongue, yet reach Occidental audiences with his sculpted visualisations.
Humour, pathos, religious and spiritual devotion, maternal, paternal and platonic love, gentleness and the harmonious co-existence of nature and man were some of the main themes that Munyaradzi expressed through his sculptures.
Typical of his signatory style was Henry Munyaradzi’s uncanny ability to enliven the stone with his deft delineation of eyes, nose and mouth, in a manner that was at once symmetric, counterpoised and surprising.
For his art, Munyaradzi derived his subject matter from the natural Shona world, combining it with Christian imagery and depicting it in an unusual, personal vision. The strength of his work lay in the purity of form, technique and imagery. His forte lay in his ability to identify the essence of his subject in the simplest of terms.
‘The Wedding of the Astronauts’, by Henry Munyaradzi His subject matter is taken from the natural world around him and only the intimate knowledge of this world can produce such minimal, but precise, expression.
The content of his sculpture was often fused with the subject he intended to tackle which usually followed the natural shape of the serpentine boulders he selected for his art. He visualized the subject intuitively and thoroughly prior to caressing the elegant form and three-dimensional solidity with acuity of sense and sensuality.
Munyaradzi’s ability to describe flora and fauna, human personalities, body language and the performance antics of animals in his body of sculpture was honed to a poetic precision.
His sculpted faces with geometric features in a low relief style, portrayed equally balanced circular eyes on both sides of an elongated rectangular nose and a small incised slit represented the mouth. His half-moon heads comprised minute but important detail and elucidated his sensitivity to meteorology, astronomy and the cycles of nature.
Even gender was distinguished in the shape of the faces. Young girls had a rounded or heart shaped with softer features; whilst the men and boys either had circular faces or longer squarish heads and faces. Age was subtly depicted in the shapes and forms that he sculpted; the longer the face the older the person.
Scale also represented wisdom and spiritual magnitude/authority. Hence pieces such as ‘The Judge’, ‘Ancestors’, ‘Sekuru’, ‘Elder’, ‘Apostles’ and ‘Father and Son’ or ‘Father and Child’ series depicted longer and bigger or larger faces, regardless of the size of the stone. His art was meditative, subtle and serene.
I first met Henry Mudzengerere Munyaradzi in 1989, when he was in his prime. As the young Deputy Head and curator at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, it was my responsibility to collate biographical and aesthetic information on all the artists, especially the Zimbabwean stone sculptors.
I found Munyaradzi to be a relatively quiet man and particularly difficult to draw information from him. He was so self-effacing and down-to-earth that one might have totally overlooked him in a crowd of artists.
He was a quiet sage though, who never spoke or boasted about his work, but allowed it to speak on his behalf.
Over the years however, we developed a close mutual relationship. A colleague, Michael My Family Shepherd, a well-respected London art critic wrote of Henry Munyaradzi: “Michelangelo’s spiritual ideal of the individual form waiting to be released from the individual stone is even more apparent here (in Munyaradzi’s art), than in Michelangelo’s own marbles.” The striking linear images in his sculpture made him internationally popular.
Henry Munyaradzi‘s output was extensive and the human figure or bust was amongst his favourite topics. His understanding of the human condition, his subtlety and power of expression combined with exceptional sculptural skills, were so outstanding that few Zimbabwean artists are so universally admired. His works are so avidly coveted, that they have retained and multiplied in value over the years
Munyaradzi’s search for a valid, vital interpretation of form and subject matter peeked in the 1980s. He clarified, simplified and edified a new conception of the stone sculptor’s experience; softening the hardness of stone with soft edged forms of human, flora and fauna.
He applied his signatory style to his visual discoveries, identic vision and interpretations of all the subjects that presented themselves to him; from the human form to fauna, flora, surrealist mythical animals, and interpretations of contemporary life, religion and dreams.
In the 1990s Munyaradzi developed the principles of his new style still further. Exploiting the natural grain and patina of the stone, he introduced textural contrasts to his work which articulated his subjects in a painterly scraffigio. Another development in his sculpture was the introduction of texture, articulated with a chasing hammer, or leaving the raw stone unworked as part of the statement in his finished sculpture.
Throughout his life Munyaradzi showed in his work a love for children, exemplary in such works as ‘Good Child’, ‘Daughter’, ‘Son’, ‘Loving Father’, etc.
‘The Good Sheppard and Bull’, ‘Cow Herder’, ‘Mudzimu Bull’, etc., have always been favoured characters in Munyaradzi’s imagination. He made many references and versions of these themes, almost as if they were self-portraits; memories and recollections of his early days as a cattle- herder in the savannahs of Mvurwi, Guruve where he grew up and later worked on farms.
During the early years Henry Munyaradzi frequently made sculptures which derived from his whimsical imagination unbridled by his style; ‘Insect Man’, ‘Tambala Man’ and ‘Astronaut’ bear the heavy tubular rounded forms characteristic of his early works. These man-sized pieced were to herald his extraordinary talent in the 1960s and 1970s.
From the clusters of metamorphic beings of the 1970s to pastoral and wild life subjects, Henry Munyaradzi’s style and content continuously changed and developed overtime. He was held in great esteem as one of the most inventive and original Zimbabwean artists.
Though self-taught, like most Shona art created from the 1950s to the 1990s, Munyaradzi’s work possessed great emotive power, augmented by an hypnotic presence. Steadfast and prolific, he was increasingly drawn to creating sculpture according to his own internal vision and his surroundings in a definitive stylistic signature.
Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD. in Art Theory and Philosophy and a DBA in Post-Colonial Heritage Studies. email: tonym.MONDA@gmail.com
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