National Museum of Art

The country's main art museum, strong on Malangatana and 20th-century Mozambican painting

The Museu Nacional de Arte (MUSART) on Avenida Ho Chi Minh is the most rewarding museum in Maputo and the best single introduction to 20th-century Mozambican art. The collection is built around the country's two giants — Malangatana Ngwenya and Naguib Elias Abdula — and extends to a wider catalogue of painters and sculptors from the FRELIMO and post-independence period: Bertina Lopes, Roberto Chichorro, Idasse Tembe, and the makaranga sculptors who work in scrap metal.

The building itself is a modest converted warehouse, with whitewashed walls that let the colour of the paintings do the work. Allow an hour. The museum opens Tuesday to Friday 10:00–17:00 and Saturday 14:00–18:00; the entrance fee is small.

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A story
The collection's centrepiece is the work of **Malangatana Valente Ngwenya** (1936–2011), Mozambique's best-known painter, whose huge canvases of teeming bodies, masks and animals borrow as much from Picasso and Goya as from his own Ronga heritage. The museum holds the largest single collection of his work in the country, including the immense civil war canvas *Sentido das Coisas*.

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