The Royal Academy’s new exhibition Oceania is as big as the subject deserves. It’s a happy coincidence for this neglected field that 2018 marks both the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy and of Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific.
This is the first major exhibition of Oceanic art in London. Maybe it will cause the same kind of stir that Oceanic art did in early 20th-century Paris, when the Surrealist André Breton hailed it as “one of the great lock-keepers of our heart”. African art may have banged a bigger drum in avant-garde Paris at the time – especially chez Picasso – but the Pacific brimmed with primeval mysticism.
