Easter Island
When European ships landed on remote Easter Island in the 1770s, they found a puzzling situation. Hundreds of colossal stone heads stood like sentinels on the stark, treeless landscape. But the impoverished, listless tribe that lived there seemed incapable of such an engineering and artistic accomplishment. And how had the stones—some weighing 50 tons —been levered into upright positions when there were no large trees from which to fashion the beams?
The mystery, and the haunting faces of the statues, seemed to capture the Western imagination. There were theories about lost races and wildly improbable sea voyages from as far away as Egypt, not to mention visitors from outer space.
When modern archaeology finally cracked the puzzle, the answer was the most obvious one. The statues were built by the ancestors of the island’s present-day residents.
A dark story emerged – about an ancient people who had developed an advanced culture with art and writing, but who had squandered their resources and spiraled down to a primitive, sustenance-level existence. Instead of a mystery, Easter Island became an environmental cautionary tale.
The art continues to exert its pull, however.
For Westerners, Easter Island’s moai, as the statues are called, are the quintessential images of Oceania, and facsimiles of their long, blank-eyed faces pop up everywhere from Hollywood movies to Polynesian-style restaurants. Seeing the real thing is a little more challenging.
Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited places in the world, and almost all of the 900 or so moai remain planted on its shores. A few were spirited away in the 19th century, however, and one is visiting New York right now.
It’s small by moai standards – only about 4 feet high compared to an average of 13 feet – but it looks plenty big inside a Metropolitan Museum gallery, where it’s the centerpiece of “Splendid Isolation: The Art of Easter Island.” The head’s a classic, with the characteristically low forehead, long ski-jump nose, lantern jaw and elongated ear lobes – the latter an Easter Island custom until the missionaries discouraged it in the late 1800s.
“Splendid Isolation” is basically one big object and about 50 little ones. The Easter Islanders – who call themselves and their island Rapa Nui – seemed to work the two extremes of artistic scale, monumental and hand-held. Big or small, however, everything the Rapa Nui made was a vessel for some kind of supernatural spirit. The moai, for example, represent ancestral chiefs who had godlike powers. Hand-carved birdman figures represent Makemake, the most powerful of the island’s gods.
Geographically, the island is a triangular land mass, about twice the size of Manhattan, formed by three now-extinct volcanoes. It lies in the southeast Pacific Ocean about 1,400 miles from the coast of Chile, of which it is now a province. The Polynesian peoples who settled it came from the Central Pacific (the vicinity of Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa) and made their way to Hawaii, New Zealand, and Tahiti beginning more than 2,000 years ago. They were the most accomplished sailors of the ancient world, able to cross more than a thousand miles of ocean in their double-hulled sailing canoes.
Easter Island, the last one to be reached, is believed to have been settled by one or two boatloads of these people about A.D. 400. The island’s population remained in the hundreds until about 1100, just about the time they started to make their monumental statuary. By 1600 there were about 6,000 people.
The growing population provided ample labor for the construction of moai, but also increased pressure on the island’s limited natural resources. Around this time, weapons begin showing up in the strata of archaeological digs and thinning pollen deposits document the disappearance of the island’s once lush forest.
Without wood, the islanders had no way of making ladders or scaffolds, nor of moving and erecting their statues. When statues fell over they couldn’t even lever them back up again. New boats were out of the question, as were wood frame houses. The society went into a sharp decline, the condition in which the Europeans found it in the late 1700s.
Like most moai, the one at the Metropolitan Museum is made from a compressed volcanic stone called tuff. It was originally part of a figure that stood roughly 8 feet high. Its pitted surface, weathered by centuries of wind and rain, was originally smoothly polished.
The wood sculptures in the exhibit further testify to a highly inventive and refined sculptural tradition. Pieces take the form of long and short dance paddles, male and female figures, birdmen, lizard men, and crouching figures of various human and animal parts.
Compare the chunky monumentality of a moai with the gracefully sinuous form of a birdman figure. The birdman, about a foot in height, has a conical human body and the menacing head of a long-beaked bird. The birdman religion involved an egg-hunting ritual that is like something out of today’s reality TV. Contestants, or their athletic stand-ins, had to descend a 1,000-foot cliff, swim to a tiny islet offshore, and be the first to find an egg of the sooty tern. The prize was the leadership of the island.
Spirit-of-the-dead statues, also called ribbed figures because of their bulging rib cages, are portrayed with concave postures and demonic faces. Feminine figures are only slightly more attractive—hipless and flat-breasted, with plank-like bodies and strong masculine features, including goatees. Naturalistic male figures lack the heroic physiques of their Western equivalents, with large, childlike heads and protruding bellies.
Polynesian art inspired the European surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s. Andre Breton called Easter Island the “modern Athens of Oceania.” Artist Max Ernst painted birdman images and human figures with the heads of moai. You can even see something of the moai texture in Alberto Giacometti’s lumpy sculptures.
What they had to admire was the utter originality. Although it shares the same roots as other Polynesian art, Easter Island art is out there on its own. The inhabitants’ isolation was their undoing, but it also created a thousand-year-long experiment in what happens when art evolves with no outside influences.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
2002
