The paintings of the Swedish artist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005) are loud and clear in their politics. Her most controversial work – so famous, it is by now pretty much proverbial – is God Giving Birth from 1968. The title spells it out; but just in case anyone is in doubt, the words are also lettered across the canvas beneath an image of a naked woman giving birth to a baby against a backdrop of outer darkness. It’s all said in stark black and white.
Reactions to this painting were (perhaps as much as the work itself) signs of the times. 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 after public outrage. The captions telling you all this are apt, and vital, in this huge Modern Art Oxford retrospective, because this is as much as anything a show of social history.
Sjöö was born in northern Sweden to artist parents. At 16 she left for Paris to become a life model but met her first husband and moved to England instead, where she had several other relationships and three sons. She was a formidable activist, her campaigns everywhere reflected in the art: against Vietnam, pro women’s rights in terms of abortion, contraception, religion, politics, wages for housework. And with the birth of her second son, an overwhelming sense that motherhood mattered on a cosmic level and was intimately connected with saving the planet.
You know where you are even before entering MAO. Sjöö’s posters paper the walls outside like a period piece to the relatively recent past: End the Patriarchy, Protect Mother Earth, Our Bodies Our Selves; exhortations, statements. Her self-styled anarcho-eco-feminism is catnip to contemporary students. Greta Thunberg is an admirer. But what strikes, inside, is the great question of what she hoped to gain by expressing her views through art.
Sjöö had an aesthetic, and she stuck to it for years (exactly how many is not obvious, since many of the works in this show are undated). She painted symbolic figures in bold black outlines on large canvases or sections of board. 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 ripple through undulating meadows beneath scintillating skies.
She cannot draw, and she doesn’t try. Her motifs are co-opted out of past art, with added planets, spiritual exaltations and occasional landmarks (Avebury, Stonehenge). Sjöö had nothing to do with the art world, working entirely outside institutions, and the look generally drifts between magic mushroom and hippy festival. Except that every other painting is pinned together with a sharp phrase or word.
Which surely goes to the heart of Sjöö’s project. For these are active paintings, forms of protest; some made to be reproduced as posters, others carried as banners on marches. They are public declarations, in which subject matter becomes illustration.
Sometimes the words exceed the images altogether. House-wives, reads the portmanteau noun stencilled above a woman scrubbing a floor, a nude with legs spread, and an ideal female head. All are depicted behind bars. But it is the idea of women as married to the house itself that startles.
Best of all are the paintings inspired by the anarchist Emma Goldman, especially a graphic double portrait, black on red, that shows her as a head within a head, thought within thought. A little burst of printed slogans rushes up beside her like fierce speech.
The Ashmolean Museum, a few streets away, is showing the enthralling Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design. This takes the eye directly into a tide of brilliant new colours, blowing the smog away from our old conceptions of Victorian society as dreary, dank and foggy. It opens with just such a vision – one of Queen Victoria’s copious mourning dresses, pitch black and dismal – and then moves straight forwards to John Ruskin’s spectacular 1871 watercolour of a kingfisher, all glittering turquoise, mauve and azure.
The eponymous colour revolution, it is argued, follows the discovery that bright synthetic dyes could be produced from coal tar, itself a byproduct of the extraction of coke from coal in the 1850s. These dyes could be staggeringly powerful. Striped stockings in magenta and sulphurous yellow, rich purple underwear, china printed in lurid ultramarine.
The show moves smartly through orientalist paintings in these vivid new colours to jewellery made out of the severed heads of iridescent hummingbirds, from gaudy pre-Raphaelite tableaux to a lady’s boot in cobalt silk and an 1860s dress in shocking electric violet.
None of these have faded and it may well be that chemistry has played its part. But the kingfisher owns its true colours, so naturally described in delicate watercolour and there are many subtler works here, by Turner and Whistler, for instance, that are as subtle as shadows. There is a great distance between wallpaper, fabric and paisley patterning – fascinating as they all are in this energetically varied anthology – and the colours of Victorian painting. And of course the scaly truth is that fashions do change.
Which is where the show becomes even more compelling, as the curators reveal a connection between morality and aesthetics. Colour, here, becomes suddenly controversial. It is not just that these brilliant hues start to be regarded as garish or vulgar. It is that specific colours indicate degrees of depravity. Eugene Grasset’s devastating 1897 lithograph shows a morphine addict shooting up her own bare thigh against a background of howling yellow. And in 1899 the Spanish artist Ramón Casas paints a young lady sprawled full-length on a couch, a book in one casual hand. The couch is arsenical green, which is bad enough, but the volume is worse: nothing less than the decadent Yellow Book. Fin-de-siècle colour is critical.
Star ratings (out of five)
Monica Sjöö ★★★
Colour Revolution ★★★★
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is at Modern Art Oxford until 25 February 2024
Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 18 February 2024
