Oviri
In Tahitian mythology, Oviri was the goddess of mourning and is shown with long pale hair and wild eyes, smothering a wolf with her feet while clutching a cub in her arms.
Tahitian goddesses of her era had passed from folk memory by 1894, yet Gauguin romanticises the island's past as he reaches towards more ancient sources, including an Assyrian relief of a "master of animals" type, and Majapahit mummies.
Other possible influences include preserved skulls from the Marquesas Islands, figures found at Borobudur, and a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in central Java.
During that winter of 1886–87, Gauguin visited Chaplet's workshop at Vaugirard, where they collaborated on stoneware pots with applied figures or ornamental fragments and multiple handles.
[8] There are two versions of what ensued: Charles Morice [fr] claimed in 1920 that Gauguin 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.
[9] According to Bengt Danielsson, Gauguin was keen to increase his public exposure and availed of this opportunity by writing an outraged letter to Le Soir, bemoaning the state of modern ceramics.
Gauguin's response centred on Oviri: I believe that my large statue in ceramic, the Tueuse ("The Murderess"), is an exceptional piece such as no ceramist has made until now and that, in addition, it would look very well cast in bronze (without retouching and without patina).
[11]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.
[16][17] It is not clear whether Oviri is smothering or hugging the cub,[18] but her pose invokes ideas of sacrifice, infanticide and the archetype of the vengeful mother, influenced by Eugène Delacroix's 1838 painting, Medea About to Kill Her Children.
These included Odilon Redon's lithograph La Mort, photographs of subjects such as a temple frieze at Borobudur, Java, and an Egyptian fresco from an 18th dynasty tomb at Thebes.
[24] Other sources that have been suggested include an Assyrian relief of Gilgamesh clutching a lion cub now in the Louvre, and a Majapahit terracotta figure from the Djakarta museum.
[25] Oviri's head seems based on mummified skulls of chieftains in the Marquesas Islands, whose eye sockets were traditionally encrusted with mother-of-pearl and worshiped as divine.
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.
[21][28] 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.
It reflects the artist's view of female sexuality; a common motif in 19th century art was the connection between long, wild hair and evil femininity.
[33] Gauguin's figure invokes the Polynesian goddess Hina, depicted by Morice as a Diana-like deity clutching a wolf cub, "monstrous and majestic, drunk with pride, rage and sorrow".
[44][45][46] 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.
[15] The anthropologist Paul van der Grijp [nl] believes Oviri was intended as an epithet to reinforce Gauguin's persona as a "civilised savage".
"[e][16][18][52] 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.
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.
