"The natives have a decided feeling for form": Oceania, "Primitive Art, " and the Illusion of Simplicity

This chapter contends that Victorian ideas about art, nature, and "primitive society" shaped a particular discourse around something understood as "primitive art" in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Ultimately C. Alfred Haddon's increased appreciation for "native" artists came with a sense of nostalgia and change, that these were forms irretrievably lost in the process of colonization. Viewing "savage" peoples as unchanged and unchanging, men such as Cambridge anthropologist Haddon, trained as a zoologist, sought to study the "primitive" peoples of Oceania before they disappeared with the onslaught of European civilization. Haddon assumed a deep connection between art and the natural environment because he understood decorative forms as rooted in the realistic portrayal of the natural world. In 1882, Pitt-Rivers gave his collection to Oxford to be the basis of a permanent exhibit, which ultimately opened ten years later as an addition to the Oxford Museum of Natural History.