by Pictures of the Swedish artist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005) were loud and clear in their politics. It is her most controversial work – so famous, that it is now quite a proverb God giving birth since 1968. The title reflects it; but in case anyone was in doubt, the words are placed across the canvas under an image of a naked woman giving birth against a background of outer darkness. It’s all said in stark black and white.
The reactions to this painting were signs of the times (perhaps as much as the work itself). Sjöö was reported to the police for blasphemy, then for obscenity. The work was removed from display at the St Ives arts council festival in 1971 following public outrage. The subtitles that tell you all this are appropriate, and crucial, in this huge retrospective of Modern Art Oxford, as this is also a reflection of social history.
Sjöö was born in northern Sweden to artist parents. At the age of 16 she left for Paris to become a model but met her first husband and moved to England instead, where she had several other relationships and three sons. She was an outstanding activist, her campaigns reflected everywhere in art: against Vietnam, women’s rights regarding abortion, contraception, religion, politics, wages for housework. And when her second son was born, there was an overwhelming sense that motherhood was important on a cosmic level and that she was closely related to saving the planet.
You know where you are even before you enter MAO. Sjöö posters paper the walls outside like a period piece from the recent past: End the Patriarchy, Protect Mother Earth, Our Bodies Ourselves; exhortations, statements. Her self-styled anarcho-eco-feminism is extremely important to contemporary students. Greta Thunberg is an admirer. But what hits, inside, is the big question of what she hoped to get by expressing her views through art.
Sjöö had an aesthetic, and she stuck to it over the years (exactly how much is unclear, since many of the works in this show are undated). She painted symbolic figures in bold black outlines on large canvases or pieces of board. Venus Willendorf, Pallas Athene, Lilith and Eve, African and Egyptian fertility goddesses: they all appear in different configurations against a more or less esoteric space that tends to be elemental. Bright rivers run through rolling meadows under bright skies.
She can’t draw, and she doesn’t try. Her motifs are co-opted from the art of the past, with additional planets, spiritual elevations and occasional landmarks (Avebury, Stonehenge). Sjöö had nothing to do with the art world, working entirely outside of institutions, and the look usually veers between a magic mushroom and a hippie festival. Except that every other painting is pinned together with a sharp phrase or word.
Which surely goes to the core of the Sjöö project. These are active pictures, forms of protest; some were reproduced as posters, others were carried as banners on marches. They are public declarations, in which the content of the subject is indicated.
Sometimes the words surpass all the images. House women, the noun portmanteau reads stenciled above a woman scrubbing a floor, nude with legs spread, and an idealized female head. They are all shown behind bars. But the idea that women are married to the house itself is cause for concern.
Best of all are the paintings inspired by the anarchist Emma Goldman, particularly a graphic double portrait, black on red, that shows her as one inside a head, in contemplation. A small burst of printed slogans runs beside her like wild speech.
The Ashmolean Museum, a few streets away, is a marvel Color Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design. This takes the eye straight into a tide of brilliant new colours, blowing the smoke away from our old conceptions of Victorian society as mist, fog and mist. It opens with such a vision – one of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses, pitch black and sombre – and then moves straight to a stunning 1871 watercolor of John Ruskin’s kingfisher, shimmering turquoise, mirage and azure.
The color revolution of the same name, it is said, follows the discovery that bright synthetic dyes could be produced from coal tar, itself a by-product of the extraction of coke from coal in the 1850s. These dyes can be extremely powerful. Striped stockings in magenta and sulphur-yellow underwear, rich purple, porcelain printed in lurid ultramarine.
The show moves cleverly through oriental paintings in these vivid fresh colors to jewelery made from the severed skulls of whimsical hummingbirds, from pre-Raphaelite tableaus to the imitation of a woman in cobalt silk and an 1860s dress in a stirring electric violet.
None of these have disappeared and chemistry may have played its part. But the kingfisher has its true colours, which are so naturally described in delicate water-colour and there are many more subtle works here, by Turner and Whistler, for example, which are as subtle as shadows. There is a great distance between wallpaper, fabric and paisley patterning – interesting as they all are in this energetically diverse anthology – and the colors of Victorian painting. And of course the scaly truth is that fashions change.
This is where the show becomes even stronger, as the curators reveal a link between morality and aesthetics. Color, here, suddenly becomes controversial. These amazing colors are not just seen as garish or vulgar. It is that specific colors indicate degrees of depravity. Eugene Grasset’s devastating lithograph from 1897 shows a morphine addict holding up his own bare thigh against a weeping yellow background. And in 1899 the Spanish artist Ramón Casas paints a young woman sprawled full length on a sofa, a book in one casual hand. The sofa is arsenic green, which is bad enough, but the volume is worse: nothing less than decadent Yellow Book. Fin-de-siècle color is key.
Star ratings (out of five)
Monica Sjöö ★★★
Color Revolution ★★★★
