Photo: Tobias Fischer/courtesy: Monica Sjöö Estate and Alison Jacques, London © Monica Sjöö Estate
The paintings of the Swedish artist Monica Sjoö (1938-2005) are loud and clear in their politics. That is her most controversial work - so famous that it is now almost proverbial God who gives birth from 1968. The title says it all; but in case anyone is in doubt, the words are also written on the canvas beneath an image of a naked woman giving birth to a baby against a backdrop of outer darkness. It's all in black and white.
The reactions to this painting were (perhaps as much as the work itself) signs of the times. Sjöö was reported to the police for blasphemy and then for obscenity. The work was removed from the exhibition at the St Ives Arts Council Festival in 1971 after public outcry. The captions that tell all this are apt and essential in this huge retrospective of Modern Art Oxford, because this is above all a display 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 reflected in art everywhere: against Vietnam, pro-women's rights on abortion, contraception, religion, politics, wages for domestic work. And with the birth of her second son came an overwhelming sense that motherhood mattered on a cosmic level and was deeply tied to saving the planet.
You know where you are even before you enter MAO. Sjöö's posters cover the walls outside like a historical piece from the relatively recent past: end patriarchy, protect mother earth, our bodies, ourselves; exhortations, explanations. Her self-proclaimed anarcho-eco-feminism is catnip for contemporary students. Greta Thunberg is an admirer. But what stands out inside is the big question of what she hoped to achieve by expressing her views through art.
Sjöö had an aesthetic, and she stuck to it for years (how much exactly is not clear, as many of the works in this exhibition are undated). She painted symbolic figures in thick black contours on large canvases or pieces of cardboard. The Venus of Willendorf, Pallas Athena, 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. Clear rivers ripple through rolling meadows under a sparkling sky.
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She can't draw and she doesn't try. Her motifs are taken from the art of the past, with added planets, spiritual transports and occasional landmarks (Avebury, Stonehenge). Sjöö had nothing to do with the art world and worked entirely outside institutions, and the look generally floats between magic mushrooms and hippie festival. Except every other painting is pinned together with a sharp sentence or word.
That 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, others were carried as banners on marches. They are public statements in which the topics are illustrative.
Sometimes the words completely outshine the images. Housewives, reads the portmanteau noun stenciled above a woman scrubbing the floor, a nude with spread legs and an ideally feminine head. All are pictured behind bars. But it is the idea of women being married to the home itself that is startling.
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 small burst of printed slogans rushes up next to her like fierce speech.
The Ashmolean Museum, a few blocks away, displays the fascinating Color Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design. This immediately leads the eye to a flood of brilliant new colours, blowing away the smog of our old views of Victorian society as gloomy, damp and misty. It begins with just such a vision - one of Queen Victoria's lavish mourning dresses, pitch black and somber - and then goes straight to John Ruskin's spectacular 1871 watercolor of a kingfisher, all shimmering turquoise, mauve and azure blue.
The eponymous color revolution, it is argued, follows the discovery that bright synthetic dyes can be produced from coal tar, itself a byproduct of the extraction of coke from coal in the 1850s. These dyes can be astonishingly powerful. Striped stockings in magenta and sulfur yellow, deep purple underwear, porcelain printed in lurid ultramarine.
The show cleverly moves from Orientalist paintings in these vibrant new colors to jewelry made from the severed heads of iridescent hummingbirds, from garish Pre-Raphaelite scenes to a women's boot in cobalt silk and an 1860s dress in shocking electric violet.
None of these have faded and chemistry may well have played a role. But the kingfisher possesses its true colours, so naturally described in delicate watercolour, and there are many subtler works here, for example by Turner and Whistler, which are as subtle as shadows. There is a great distance between wallpaper, fabric and paisley patterns - fascinating as they all are in this energetically varied anthology - and the colors of Victorian painting. And of course the poor truth is that fashion changes.
That's where the show becomes even more compelling, as the curators reveal a connection between morality and aesthetics. Color suddenly becomes controversial here. It's not just that these brilliant shades are considered garish or vulgar. In fact, specific colors indicate the degree of depravity. Eugene Grasset's devastating 1897 lithograph shows a morphine addict shooting her own bare thigh against a background of weeping yellow. And in 1899, the Spanish artist Ramón Casas painted a young lady stretched out on a couch, with a book in one loose hand. The sofa is arsenic green, which is bad enough, but the volume is even worse: nothing short of decadent Yellow book. Fin-de-siècle colors are crucial.
Star ratings (out of five)
Monica Sjoö ★★★ Color revolution ★★★★