Paintings of the Swedish artist Monica Sjoö (1938-2005) are clear and clear in their policies. His most controversial work – so famous that it’s now famous – God Gives Birth From 1968. The title explains it; but in case anyone is in doubt, these words are also written on the canvas below an image of a naked woman giving birth to a baby in front of the darkness outside. Everything is said in black and white.
The reactions to this painting (perhaps as much as the work itself) were signs of the period. Sjöö was first reported to the police for blasphemy and then for obscenity. The work was removed from display at the St Ives arts council festival in 1971 following public outrage. Subtitles that tell you all this about this massive Modern Art Oxford retrospective are apt and vital, because this is a social history show more than anything else.
Sjöö was born into an artistic family in northern Sweden. At 16 she went to Paris to become a life model but met her first husband and moved to England instead; She had other relationships and three sons here. She was a great activist; Their campaigns were reflected in art everywhere: against Vietnam, pro-abortion, birth control, religion, politics, pro-women’s rights in terms of wages for housework. With the birth of her second son, there was an overwhelming feeling that motherhood was cosmically important and intimately linked to saving the planet.
You know where you are even before you enter MAO. Sjöö’s posters cover the walls outside like period pieces from the relatively recent past: End the Patriarchy, Protect Mother Earth, Our Bodies and Ourselves; advice, explanations. Her particular brand of anarcho-eco-feminism is catnip for contemporary students. Greta Thunberg is a fan. But what is striking inside is the question of what she hopes to gain by expressing her views through art.
Sjöö had an aesthetic and stuck to it for years (it’s unclear exactly how many there are, as most of the works in this exhibition are undated). He painted symbolic figures with thick black lines on large canvases or sections of wood. The Venus of Willendorf, Pallas Athene, Lilith and Eve, African and Egyptian fertility goddesses: all appear in different configurations against a more or less esoteric space that tends to be elemental. Bright rivers undulate in undulating meadows beneath shimmering skies.
He can’t paint and he doesn’t try. Its motifs are drawn from past works of art, with added planets, spiritual glories, and occasional landmarks (Avebury, Stonehenge). Sjöö had nothing to do with the art world, working entirely outside institutions, and the outlook often oscillated between magic mushroom and hippie festival. But all the other images are held together by a sharp phrase or word.
This certainly goes to the heart of Sjöö’s project. Because these are active paintings, forms of protest; Some were made to be reproduced as posters, while others were carried as banners in marches. These are public statements in which the subject becomes illustration.
Sometimes words transcend entire images. Housewifes, reads the portmanteau name molded above a woman scrubbing the floor, a naked man with his legs spread wide, and an ideal female head. They are all depicted behind bars. But what is truly surprising is the idea that women are married to the house.
Best of all are the paintings inspired by the anarchist Emma Goldman, especially the black-on-red graphic double portrait that shows her as a head within a head, a thought within a thought. A small explosion of printed slogans rushes past him like a stern speech.
A few streets away, the Ashmolean Museum showcases the fascinating view. Color Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion design. This clears the smoke from our old perceptions of Victorian society as dreary, damp and foggy, directing our eyes directly to a wave of bright new colours. It opens with just such an image – one of Queen Victoria’s flowing mourning dresses, pitch black and sombre – and then moves directly to John Ruskin’s magnificent 1871 watercolor of a kingfisher, all turquoise, mauve and azure shimmer.
The eponymous color revolution allegedly followed the discovery in the 1850s that bright synthetic dyes could be produced from coal tar, a byproduct of the extraction of coke from coal. These dyes can be surprisingly powerful. Lavender and sulfur striped socks, rich purple underwear, bright navy blue printed china.
The exhibition cleverly moves from orientalist paintings in these vibrant new colors to jewelry made from the severed heads of iridescent hummingbirds, from ornate Pre-Raphaelite paintings to a cobalt silk woman’s boot and an 1860s dress in shocking electric violet.
None of this is lost, and it’s likely that chemistry has done its part as well. But the kingfisher has its true colours, naturally defined by delicate watercolour, and here, for example, there are many works by Turner and Whistler as subtle as shadows. There is a great distance between the fascinating patterns of wallpaper, fabric and paisley in this energetic anthology and the colors of Victorian painting. And of course the sequined truth is that fashions change.
The exhibition becomes even more interesting as the curators reveal the connection between morality and aesthetics. Here color suddenly becomes controversial. It’s not just that bright colors come to be seen as garish or vulgar. Certain colors indicate degrees of immorality. Eugene Grasset’s devastating 1897 lithograph shows a morphine addict shooting his own bare buttocks against a howling yellow background. And in 1899, Spanish artist Ramón Casas painted a young lady stretched out on a sofa with a book in one hand. The couch is arsenic green, which is bad enough, but the noise level is even worse: it’s nothing short of decadent. Yellow Book. Fin-de-siècle color is critical.
Star ratings (out of five)
Monica Sjoö ★★★
Color Revolution ★★★★