Oceania at the Tropenmuseum is not in the first place a book on art
from Oceania, but rather a treatise on the coming into existence and
growth of a well-known Oceanic collection, which started at the
beginning of the 20th century with the bringing together of the
collections of the Colonial Museum in the Dutch provincial town of
Haarlem and the ethnographic collection of Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo. The
objects were, then and later on, brought together by early explorers,
travellers, scientific expeditions, missionaries, Dutch government
officials, ethnologists and collectors, most of them within the context
of Dutch colonial presence in New Guinea, from where the majority of
objects originate. During the last hundred years the intellectual
approach to the collection changed from evidences of cultures in
far-away places to the cultural heritage of world citizens, whose
objects of art and material culture has been amassed during the colonial
period of Western history. This richly illustrated book emphasizes this
historical context and the way the objects were collected and presented
to the public until today.