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‘A freedom that left Picasso and Matisse running to catch up’ … a female tattooed figure, 18th or early 19th century, Aitutaki, Cook Islands.
‘A freedom that left Picasso and Matisse running to catch up’ … a female tattooed figure, 18th or early 19th century, Aitutaki, Cook Islands. Photograph: Five Continents Museum, Munich
‘A freedom that left Picasso and Matisse running to catch up’ … a female tattooed figure, 18th or early 19th century, Aitutaki, Cook Islands. Photograph: Five Continents Museum, Munich

Oceania review – marvels of the human mind that were ripped off by modernists

This article is more than 5 years old

Royal Academy, London
From a two-headed Tahitian god to a mourner’s costume made of pearl shells, this dazzling exhibition is like having the ocean roll under your canoe

In around 1900, an artist portrayed a woman with an oval abstract face bisected by a long rigid slash of a nose, who sits with her legs wide apart to expose her triangular pubic hair framing a well-observed vagina. And no, this artist was not Picasso.

This wooden figure that an islander created in today’s Republic of Palau, in the western Pacific, bears an astonishing resemblance to one of the women in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the revolutionary painting Picasso made on the far side of the world in his Montmartre studio in 1907. There’s a similarly squatting figure in Les Demoiselles and almost identical mask-like faces. At this moment in history there was such a quantum entanglement between Paris and the Pacific that artists in the two places were creating the same images.

Lisa Reihana in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015–17 (detail). Photograph: © Image courtesy of the artist and ARTPROJECTS

It was the European modernists, of course, who got all the wealth and fame while their collections of Oceanian art went down in art history as troves of “raw material” for their supposedly unprecedented ideas. Wandering through the Royal Academy’s intoxicating forest of sculpted symbols from the Pacific, I am inclined to see the whole thing more bluntly. It wasn’t a coincidence that Picasso saw like an Oceanian. This dazzling exhibition is full of the art the fathers of modernism ripped off.

How much art from the Pacific islands – as well as Africa – Picasso saw before painting Les Demoiselles is disputed, but there are so many daring, confrontational artistic inventions here that it becomes obvious the presence of such pieces in European collections must have been fundamental to the shattering of Europe’s own artistic assumptions at the end of the 19th century. Imagine how dreary a Victorian painting or statue, cleaving to notions of verisimilitude established four centuries earlier, must have looked beside the glowering, pulsing statue of the Hawaiian god Ki’i, “the island snatcher”, when this masterpiece entered the collection of the British Museum in 1839. Europeans at the time may have called such pieces “primitive”, but it didn’t take long for their power to shake the foundations of western art.

Feather god image (akua hulu manu), late 18th century, Hawaiian Islands. Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum

The creativity on show here displays a freedom that had Picasso, Matisse and the rest running to catch up. Why give a being just one head? An early 19th-century sculpture of a Tahitian god has two, emerging from the shoulders of a single fat body. A male deity from the Caroline Islands has an eerily blank face that anticipates the marionette-like beings Malevich painted in Stalin’s Russia: it’s clear the sheer scale of modern art’s debt to the Pacific has yet to be properly acknowledged, or fully understood.

Oceanian art was, in fact, seen in Europe a long time before that of central Africa. Its first European collectors were James Cook and the scientists and artists he took on his epochal voyages of discovery. There are works here that were brought back by Cook – mostly, it should be stressed, after being exchanged as gifts in friendly and respectful encounters. One reason that Cook and his chief scientist, Joseph Banks, were able to negotiate many of their meetings happily was through the mediation of Tupaia, a high priest they met in Tahiti who not only helped Banks understand its customs but sailed on as a translator.

The welcome Haka by members of Ngati Ranana, the London Maori Club Blessing ceremony for Oceania at the Royal Academy. Photograph: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock

Tupaia also made faithful drawings of Pacific costumes and ceremonies. His watercolour here of a Chief Mourner of Tahiti wearing a mask made of two metallic-looking discs that create a lunar abstract effect dates from 1769. Near it is a real Chief Mourner’s costume from the 18th century – and it does indeed have those lunar discs. Magically they are made of glistening pearl shells.

In this exhibition you can feel the ocean roll under your canoe, hear sea birds and see dorsal fins. The Royal Academy helps by painting some of the rooms ocean blue. Long before Cook explored the vastness of the Pacific, its indigenous peoples did. The very existence of the art here is a monument to one of humanity’s greatest and earliest acts of exploration. Human beings reached Papua New Guinea and Australia from Africa more than 50,000 years ago, and this stone age act of audacity was followed by canoe voyages that gradually encompassed myriads of islands. This maritime world is beautifully documented here, not only by gorgeously carved boats and oars but navigational maps made of strips of wood to mark the canoe routes, and shells to denote islands. These are marvels of the human mind.

Living so close to the sea makes for intimacy with its other inhabitants. On a decorative house beam from the Solomon Islands, black and white sea birds, tuna, and sharks are carved with acute realism. You can feel the natural word as if you were in a canoe. Natural observation is everywhere. So are human images including the recurring theme of a mother nursing her child. Yet these great artists felt no need to be confined by realism. Birds become beaked patterns, humans become fantastic deities.

Ahu ula (feather cloak) belonging to Liholoho, Kamehameha II, early 19th century. Photograph: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

I don’t just like this art. I want to live in the world it portrays. That was what the first Europeans who visited Tahiti felt. Cook tried to restrain his men from getting too relaxed there. In 1789, the crew of the Bounty were so seduced by this paradise they mutinied. This art is not like modernism after all, for Picasso was making images for art galleries, for an aesthetic elite. The objects here express instead a way of life.

Gone, of course. It comes as real pain to enter the final rooms and see the destruction of a world. The encounters that so nourished European art brought the Pacific islands missionaries and global pop culture. A late 20th-century war shield from Papua New Guinea has the face of the comic book hero The Phantom on it. American comics were brought there by GIs in the 1940s and fitted well with warrior ideals. Funny? No, it is a tragic document of the destruction of human culture’s variety in our monotonously modern world.

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