In the early twentieth century, the cubists and the surrealists fell in love with ‘primitive art’. They acquired examples for their studios and homes, and the forms influenced their own work. ‘Primitivism’ fed into modern art, so that, today, ‘primitive art’ doesn't seem out of place in plush modernist interiors. In his paintings, Graham Fletcher—an artist of mixed European and Samoan heritage—discovers displaced Pacific-art objects in the homes of the well-to-do, asking how they could have become absorbed as markers of Western good taste.
