Circumambulating Paul Gauguin’s Oviri as an Archetype of Matriarchal Consciousness: A Visual Analysis from a Jungian Perspective

Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903) was a Symbolist artist best known for his colorful Tahitian paintings. He was also a lauded sculptor. Yet, the symbolic richness of his work is often dampened by conceptions of the artist as working from a colonial gaze or, more troublingly, as a man working from harmful sexual deviancy. In this paper, I aim to challenge notorious assumptions of Gauguin’s work by proposing that the artist was working psychologically from a matriarchal state of consciousness, defined by Jungian psychanalyst Erich Neumann as a state of cultural productivity, stemming from a natural unity with the personal and collective unconscious. Thus, I initially set out to a) thematically analyze the artist’s published writings for feminist themes; b) qualitatively analyze the artist’s background for matriarchal attitudes; c) visually analyzed one of Gauguin’s artworks, Oviri (1894, Musée d’Orsay) for matriarchal themes, chosen for its great significance in the artist’s life (a copy acts as a marker on his grave). Findings point to Oviri as an expression of matriarchal consciousness, valuing androgyny as a tool of political resistance. Furthermore, visual iconography, like the dead wolf at the base of the sculpture, points to more collectively minded, sociopolitical concerns, grounding the work as an affirmation of his stance against Tahitian occupation. Thus, findings from this project support contemporary feminist approaches towards Gauguin’s work, which regard the artist as an ally rather than a perpetuator of exploitation against an oppressed culture. Findings also support the validity of Jungian psychanalysis as an art-historical methodology.

Keywords: Paul Gauguin, Symbolism, Oviri, Tahitian Culture, Androgyny, Jungian Psychanalysis, Matriarchal Consciousness.