ART on view
OCEANIA
Voyages through the Immensity
An important collection of Oceanic art is shared by
the Belgian federal scientifi c institutions of the Musée
l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren and the Musées Royaux
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d’Art et Histoire (better known as the Musée
du Cinquantenaire). On view at the Cinquantenaire
until April 29, 2018, is a selection of masterpieces
from this collection, presented in the context of the
voyages on which they were collected. Sometimes referred
to as the fi fth continent, Oceania is a vast sea
that fi rst became known to Europeans through the
earliest of these expeditions. A signifi cant part of the
mindset of the native Oceanic peoples also relates to
the vastness of this region, and, in earlier times, the
objectives of their frequent crossings between Pacifi c
islands had less to do with the promise of material
gain as maintaining a social order in which prestige
and its material manifestations were operative factors.
Oceania : Voyages dans l’Immensité also examines
the voyages made by European explorers,
which largely commenced in the eighteenth century
and continued in order to maintain contact with the
tiny lands that are all but lost in the vastness of the
Pacifi c Ocean.
Ever since the account of Dumont d’Urville’s voyage
was published in 1857, it has been customary to
divide Oceania into three areas: Melanesia, Micronesia,
and Polynesia. However, only the last of these
appears to have any real veracity. The geographic
triangle outlined by Hawaii, Easter Island, and New
Zealand reveals a relatively pronounced cultural
and linguistic homogeneity. Within this there have
been accumulations of infl uences from successive
migrations that have given rise to related cultural
contexts, sometimes isolated and sometimes fragmented.
Moving forward, it might be better to refer
to two cultural areas of the South Pacifi c. “Near
Oceania” essentially refers to what was formerly
called Melanesia (a pejorative term that effectively
means “black islands”), an area that was fi rst settled
between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago by anatomi-
By Nicolas Cauwe