Hell on Earth

RUTH BERENSON

For most of us, the words “Pacific Islands” conjure up visions of palm-fringed beaches and blue lagoons, with flower-wreathed youths and half-nude dusky maidens living off coconuts, their lives an unending idyll, at least until the white man came bringing the dubious gifts of civilization. Of course, the myth has often been punctured; neither Gauguin nor Robert Louis Stevenson managed to find Nirvana in Samoa, and the American soldiers who slogged through the jungles of the Solomon Islands and New Guinea during World War II encountered no lost paradise. Perhaps the magnificent exhibition “Art of the Pacific Islands,” now at the National Gallery in Washington (to October 14), will deal it a final death blow, for it reveals a world that for centuries, both before and after the white man’s coming, has been haunted by fears and nightmares, demons and malevolent spirits, and plagued by untamed natural forces that bring disaster in their wake and by tribal wars marked by head-hunting and cannibalism. Rather than an Eden, this brilliant show documents a hell on earth.

NH

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Nika Hazelton

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RUTH BERENSON

For most of us, the words “Pacific Islands” conjure up visions of palm-fringed beaches and blue lagoons, with flower-wreathed youths and half-nude dusky maidens living off coconuts, their lives an unending idyll, at least until the white man came bringing the dubious gifts of civilization. Of course, the myth has often been punctured; neither Gauguin nor Robert Louis Stevenson managed to find Nirvana in Samoa, and the American soldiers who slogged through the jungles of the Solomon Islands and New Guinea during World War II encountered no lost paradise. Perhaps the magnificent exhibition “Art of the Pacific Islands,” now at the National Gallery in Washington (to October 14), will deal it a final death blow, for it reveals a world that for centuries, both before and after the white man’s coming, has been haunted by fears and nightmares, demons and malevolent spirits, and plagued by untamed natural forces that bring disaster in their wake and by tribal wars marked by head-hunting and cannibalism. Rather than an Eden, this brilliant show documents a hell on earth.