Paul Gauguin, Oviri (Sauvage), 1894, partially glazed stoneware, 75 x 19 x 27 cm (29.5 x 7.5 x 10.6 in), Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Oviri ([Savage or wild] Error: ((Lang-xx)): text has italic markup (help))[1] is a ceramic sculpture by the French artist Paul Gauguin. He made three casts in 1894, each in partially glazed stoneware. The original is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, the other two in private collections. Oviri was a Tahitian goddess of mourning and is depicted with long pale hair and large wild eyes. She smothers a wolf with her feet while tightly clutching a cub in her arms. Gauguin's sculpture invokes ideas of sacrifice, infanticide and the archetype of the vengeful mother. Tahitian goddesses of her era had long passed from living and folk memory by 1894. Gauguin seems to romanticise the island's past while reaching towards more ancient sources, including Assyrian and Majapahit mummies. Amongst other possible influences, her head seems based on preserved skulls from the Marquesas Islands, her body from figures found at Borobudur, a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in central Java.
Gauguin wanted one of the Oviri statues on his grave; one was finally placed there in 1973. There are only three other surviving comments of his on the figure: on an 1895 presentation mount of two impressions of a woodcut of the Oviri figure he made to Stéphane Mallarmé where he called the figure a strange and cruel enigma; in an 1897 letter to Ambroise Vollard where he referred to it as La Tueuse ("The Murderess"); and in a c 1899 drawing where he appends an inscription referencing Honoré de Balzac's novel Séraphîta.[2]Oviri was exhibited at the 1906 Salon d'Automne (no. 57)[3] where it influenced Pablo Picasso, who based one of the figures in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon on it.[4]
Background
Gauguin was foremost a painter; he came to ceramics around 1886, when he was taught by the French sculptor and ceramist fr [Ernest Chaplet]. Félix Bracquemond had introduced Chaplet to Gauguin[5] who, inspired by the new French art pottery, was experimenting with the form. During that winter of 1886–87, Gauguin attended the Vaugirard studio and with Chaplet created some 55 stoneware pots with applied figures or ornamental fragments, multiple handles, painted and partially glazed.[6]
Gauguin completed Oviri in the winter of 1894, during his return from Tahiti, and submitted it to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts 1895 salon opening in April the following year.[7] There are two versions of what ensued: Morice, in 1920, claimed that he was "literally expelled" from the exhibition; in 1937 Ambroise Vollard wrote that the piece was admitted only when Chaplet threatened to withdraw his own works in protest.[8] Gauguin, ever keen to increase his public exposure, availed of the opportunity by writing an outraged letter to Le Soir, bemoaning the state of modern ceramics.[9]
He first visited Tahiti in 1891, and attracted by the beauty of Tahitian women undertook a set of sculptural mask-like portraits on paper. They evoke both melancholy and death, and conjure the state of faaturuma (brooding or melancholy); imagery and moods later used in the Oviri ceramic.[10] Gauguin's first wood carvings in Tahiti were with a guava wood that quickly crumbled and have not survived. Art historian Christopher Gray mentions three plaster casts, the fissured surfaces of which suggest that they were taken from a prior undocumented wood carving no longer extant. One was given to Daniel Monfreid and now belongs to the Musée départemental Maurice Denis "The Priory" in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. A number of bronzes were made from this cast, including the version placed on Gauguin's grave at Atuona.[11]
Oviri has long blonde or grey hair reaching to her knees. Her head is disproportionately large, as are her eyes, while she has adolescent breasts.[12] She holds a wolf cub to her hip, a symbol of her indifference and wild power.[12][13] It is not clear whether the woman is smothering or hugging the cub.[14] A second animal, likely another wolf, is shown at her feet either curling in submission or dead.[15] Historians such as Sue Taylor suggest this represents Gauguin.[16] It is related to the 1889 ceramic Black Venus, which shows a woman kneeling over a decapitated head resembling Gauguin.[16][17]
The association between the woman and a wolf stems from a remark Edgar Degas made defending Gauguin's work at the poorly received 1893 Durand-Ruel exhibition, when Degas quoted La Fontaine's fable The Wolf and the Dog: "You see, Gauguin is the wolf."[16][18] In Oviri, the mature wolf, the European Gauguin, perishes while the whelp, the Gauguin of Tahiti, survives.[19]
The Tahitian myths had largely disappeared by Gauguin's time (he based his own accounts on other sources without acknowledgement), as had most artefacts associated with that culture. His representation of Oviri is largely a work of imagination, informed by a collection of what he described as his "little world of friends" and which he took with him to Tahiti on his first visit. These included Redon's lithograph La Mort, photographs of subjects such as a temple frieze at Borobudur, Java, and an Egyptian fresco from an XVIIIth dynasty tomb at Thebes.[20] Other sources that have been suggested include an Assyrianrelief of Gilgamesh clutching a lion cub in the Louvre, and a Majapahit terracotta figure from the Djakarta museum.[21]
Oviri's head seem based on mummified skulls of chieftains in the Marquesas Islands, whose eye sockets were traditionally encrusted with mother-of-pearl and worshiped as divine. Oviri's body might be influenced by Borobudor images of fecundity. Thus life and death were evoked in the same image.[22] Morice titled the sculpture Diane Chasseresse ("Diana the Huntress"), that is the ancient Greek goddess Diana of the hunt, moon and childbirth, in a letter to Mallarmé trying to raise a public subscription to purchase the work. He made the same reference in his poems on Oviri. Barbara Landy interprets the life and death theme as indicating Gauguin's need to abandon his civilised ego in a return to the natural state of the primitive savage.[8][23]
Gauguin depicts the Oviri figure in at least one drawing, two watercolor transfers and two woodblocks. It is possible that the woodblocks were created in Pont-Aven in the summer of 1894; before the ceramic.[24] The last to appear is probably the drawing in what is apparently the first issue of Gauguin's Papeete broadsheet Le Sourire "(The Smile: A Serious Newspaper)" published between August 1899 and April 1900. It was accompanied by the inscription "Et le monstre, entraînant sa créature, féconde de sa semence des flancs généreux pour engendrer Séraphitus-Séraphita" (And the monster, embracing its creation, filled her generous womb with seed and fathered Séraphitus-Séraphita). Séraphitus-Séraphita is an allusion to Honoré de Balzac's novel Séraphîta which features an androgynous hero. In this first issue of Le Sourire, he reviewed a play by a local Maohi author, one of whose themes involved incest, and invokes 'Séraphitus-Séraphita'. The review congratulated the play's "savage author" and ended with a plea for women's liberation through the abolition of marriage. The accompanying drawing is distinctly androgynous.[25]
Interpretation
Gauguin was deeply unhappy at the time. He had injured his ankle during a drunken brawl the previous summer, and failed in a lawsuit to have paintings returned to him, although he did receive some damages. A February 1895 auction at Hôtel Drouot intended to pay for a second visit to Tahiti failed to raise enough money.[26] The Polynesian goddess Hina was depicted by Morice as a Diana-like deity clutching a wolf cub, "monstrous and majestic, drunk with pride, rage and sorrow".[27] He titled a 1894 self-portrait in plaster as Oviri.[12] The original is lost but a number of bronze casts survive. He used double mirrors to capture his familiar Inca profile, the result reprising his Jug in the Form of a Head, Self-Portrait. This was one of the earliest occasions Gauguin applied the term Oviri to himself.[28][29][30] "Gauguin sometimes also referred to himself as Oviri, the savage...", writes Merete Bodelsen.[31][32]
The Stuttgart version of his 1892 oil painting E haere oe i hia (Where Are You Going?) depicts a woman clutching a wolf cub.[26] Pollitt remarks that this stocky, sculptural and androgynous figure gives a first glimpse of Oviri.[33][a]
Oviri, 1894. Watercolor monotype heightened with gouache on Japan paper laid down on board. Private collection
Oviri was the title of his favourite Tahitian song; a melancholy tune of love and longing that mentions the subject's "savage, restless heart".[9] It conveys the love of two women, both of whom have grown silent and cold. Gauguin translated the verse in "Noa Noa""; the only one of his songs reprinted in the Tahitian newspaper La Guêpes when he became editor.[b] Danielsson believes the song echoes his dual attachment to his wife Mette and his then vahine (Tahitian for "woman") Teha'amana, his young native wife and the focal point of "Noa Noa".[34] He asked that Oviri be placed on his grave,[c] which seems to indicate that he saw the figure as his alter ego and the fox as changeable in its gender as he was (according to Mathews) and thus symbolic of dangerous sexuality.[35] Both Taylor and Yeon Shim Chung mention how the aperture at the back of Oviri's head resembles a vaginal orifice.[36] Taylor presents sources indicating that Gauguin was at this time suffering a syphilitic rash that prevented him from travelling to Tahiti for several months while he sought treatment.[d] She suggests the orifice is a pars pro toto for the woman who infected him.[36]
"Noa Noa" contains an account of a journey into the mountains with a young man whom he eventually understands as sexless, leading him to meditate on the "androgynous side of the savage" in his manuscript.[37][38][39] Ben Pollitt notes that in Tahitian culture the craftsman/artist, neither warrior/hunter nor homemaker/carer, was conceived androgynously, an ambiguous gender position that appealed to Gauguin's subversive nature.[33] Taylor believes Morice may have been describing Gauguin in his 1897 poem Shining Hina of the Woods as part of two long extracts from their collaboration on "Noa Noa". Gray views the sculpture as representing "the expression of Gauguin's profound disillusionment and discouragement".[7]
The psychoanalyst John Gedo and anthropologist Paul van der Grijp believe Oviri was intended as an epithet to reinforce Gauguin's persona as a "civilised savage".[40][41] The artist wrote in his final letter to Charles Morice that "You were wrong that day when you said I was wrong to say I was a savage. It's true enough: I am a savage. And civilised people sense the fact. In my work there is nothing that can surprise or disconcert, except the fact that I am a savage in spite of myself. That's also why my work is inimitable."[e][12][14][42]
Nancy Mowll Mathews believes the creatures in her arms and at her feet are actually foxes, animals Gauguin had used in his 1889 wood carving Be in Love, You Will Be Happy and in his 1891 Pont-Aven oil painting The Loss of Virginity. In an 1889 letter to Émile Bernard, he described the Soyez amoureuses fox as an "Indian symbol of perversity".[43] There is a long tradition in Asian folklore of foxes having the power to transform into women (for example in Japanese Yōkai folklore).[44]
Whether or not the sculpture was to be exhibited at the Salon de la Nationale, it was scheduled for the café proprietor Lévy at 57 rue Saint-Lazare, with whom Gauguin had concluded an agreement to represent him before his last departure for Tahiti. It failed to sell. After, Charles Morice was unsuccessful in raising public money to acquire it for the nation. Gauguin had thought his only likely interested patron would be Gustave Fayet, who did eventually buy it for 1,500 francs, but in 1905, after Gauguin's death.[45]
Gauguin became a focal point of the Parisian avant-garde in the wake of the posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in 1903 and 1906. Picasso's monumental figures of 1906 were directly influenced by the paintings and sculptures of Gauguin. The savage power evoked by Gauguin's work lead directly to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907. According to Gauguin biographer David Sweetman, Picasso became an aficionado of Gauguin's work in 1902 when he befriended the expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramist Paco Durrio in Paris. Durrio was both a friend of Gauguin and an agent of his work. He had several works by the artist, in an attempt to help his poverty-stricken friend in Tahiti by promoting his oeuvre in Paris.[46]
The 1906 exhibition of Gauguin's work left Picasso more than ever in this artist's thrall. Gauguin demonstrated the most disparate types of art—not to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical myths, and much else besides—could be combined into a synthesis that was of its time yet timeless. An artist could also confound conventional notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing his demons to the dark gods (not necessarily Tahitian ones) and tapping a new source of divine energy.[47]
Both Sweetman and Richardson point to the Gauguin's Oviri as a major influence. First exhibited in the 1906 Salon d'Automne retrospective, it was likely a direct influence on Les Demoiselles. Sweetman writes, "Gauguin's statue Oviri, which was prominently displayed in 1906, was to stimulate Picasso's interest in both sculpture and ceramics, while the woodcuts would reinforce his interest in print-making, though it was the element of the primitive in all of them which most conditioned the direction that Picasso's art would take. This interest would culminate in the seminal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."[46]
In 2007, a bronze version of Oviri sold at Christie's New York for US$251,200.[48]
^Taylor however believes the ceramic pre-dates other representations. The 1892 painting is of dubious provenance and not known before 1923, its authenticity questioned by Richard Field, Paul Gauguin: The Paintings of the First Voyage to Tahiti See Taylor, 346
^Gauguin copied the song into his second 1893–95 draft in collaboration with Charles Morice. Danielsson describes the translation as very poor and provides his own.
^Letter XLVIII to Monfreid: the sculpture is not named and he says in the first place he wants it to decorate his garden:"The large ceramic figure that did not find a purchaser ... I should like to have it here for the decoration of my garden and to put on my tomb in Tahiti." The ceramic was never shipped out.
^Danielsson, 182, mentions an oral source to the effect that when Gauguin returned, his vahine Teha'amana spent a week with him but was repulsed by the running sores covering his body
^Letter to Charles Morice, April 1903. Malingue 1949, CLXXXI: "Tu t'es trompé un jour en disant que j'avais tort de dire que je suis un sauvage. Cela est cependant vrai : je suis un sauvage . Et les civilisés le pressentent : car dans mes œuvres il n'y a rien qui surprenne, déroute, si ce n'est ce « malgré-moi-de-sauvage ». C'est pourquoi c'est inimitable."
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