Heading up the Triumph of Art parade organised by the artist Jeremy Deller to celebrate the National Gallery’s 250th birthday last summer was a giant inflatable sculpture of a reclining female nude, some five metres long. But this curvaceous balloon, carried up London’s Whitehall and launched into one of the fountains in Trafalgar Square, wasn’t inspired by Titian, Velázquez or Rubens. Instead, it was based on a work by Beryl Cook, the artist and proprietress of a seaside guest house, whose paintings of ample-figured females have adorned a plethora of mass-produced greetings cards, calendars and prints since the 1980s.
There are no Cooks in the National Gallery and emphatically none in the Tate. (In 1996 the then-Tate director Nicholas Serota made a point of emphasising that “there will be no Beryl Cooks in the Tate Gallery”.) But recently much of the snootiness around the saucy, good-humoured paintings of this self-taught artist has been dispelled and Cook is now experiencing a major reassessment. Along with the parade inflatable, based on her 1980 painting Nude on a Leopard Skin Rug, another crucial milestone in Cook’s art-world rehabilitation was a 2024 exhibition at London’s Studio Voltaire which paired her with Touko Laaksonen, AKA Tom of Finland, another figure largely ignored by the art world and also distinguished by his exaggerated depictions of bawdily bulbous figures—albeit aimed at a rather different audience.
Hyper-realised figures
“They both articulate the human figure in very distinctive and hyper-realised ways,” declared Joe Scotland, the director of Studio Voltaire, in a Guardian interview at the time. He also praised Cook and Tom of Finland for their “wonderful sense of pleasure and fun and desire that is free of any sense of shame”. He pointed to how each artist explores “ideas around gender, class, politics, body image and much more in their work”, before adding, “and then, of course, there are simply joyous celebrations of some amazing bums”.
A multitude of amazing bums are currently on display in Pride and Joy, a major survey at The Box in Plymouth, the Devon coastal city where Cook lived for 40 years. Her paintings convey joyousness in abundance, reflecting the artist’s claim that: “I’m only motivated to paint people enjoying themselves; if I saw something sad, I wouldn’t dream of painting that!” Middle-aged, proudly plus-sized women eat, drink and are merry, gathering in pubs, clubs and cafés, smoking, strutting their stuff and dressed to the nines. Every nuance of style and social interaction is keenly observed, too; the paintings buzz with body language, gesture and an abundance of side eye.
Visual document
Cook was a regular in Plymouth’s gay bars in the 1970s and 1980s, and her acerbic yet affectionate recordings of their clientele are testament to her deep affinity with the LGBTQ+ community. These works form a valuable visual document of now long-gone safe spaces in a troubled and less tolerant time. Cook preferred to record rather than participate in the shenanigans that play out in her paintings, keeping a low profile even when the popularity of her work made her a household name.
Pride and Joy offers conclusive evidence that, while her paintings were widely accessible, Cook was a more complex and nuanced artist than the art snobs would allow for. Her animated depictions of working-class and marginalised communities engage and hold our attention in great part due to their deftly choreographed compositions and killer details. Cook could, for example, conjure up individuality and character using the merest flick of an eyeball or angle of a well-shod foot. Printed reproductions of her work also belie a remarkable technical ability to express a rich variety of textures, from herringbone tweed to fluttering foliage, scratchy sideburns or a backcombed bouffant.
She may not have had a formal training but Cook knew her art history. At The Box there’s a special section devoted to contextualising her paintings with the artists she loved and whose work chimes with her own, including Peter Paul Rubens, Edward Burra, Stanley Spencer and Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Meanwhile, across town at Karst Gallery, another important strand in Plymouth’s centenary programme looks to the here and now. Discord & Harmony, featuring works by artists including Mark Leckey, Anthea Hamilton, Eric Bainbridge and Olivia Sterling, demonstrates the continuing relevance of Cook to younger artists.
Among the multigenerational throng at both openings—many sporting leopard print in homage to the flashy outfits favoured by Cook’s subjects—there was the consensus that, despite some of the grumbles of the art elite, it is possible, indeed essential, to be both funny and serious.
• Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy, The Box, until 31 May; Discord & Harmony, Karst, until 18 April
