Too Popular, Too Female, Too Joyful: Why Beryl Cook Is Dismissed by the Art Establishment
Please note: the paintings referred to herein are numbered and featured at the end of the post. These days you have to get your pride and joy where you can. One place is, and always has been, in the art of Beryl Cook, so an exhibition of the same name at The Box in Plymouth (until 31 May 2026), commemorating the centenary of her birth, is timely. It also marks fifty years since the broader public clapped eyes on 'The paintings of a seaside landlady', in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1976. By the mid-seventies Cook had been painting full-time, but one must never let facts get in the way of a snooty strapline. The Sunday Times Magazine, February 8, 1976 Not much has changed; class and gender are always referenced up-front with Cook, still, and critics often write in their own image, just as Cook was assumed to paint in hers. 'Beryl Cook: a homely, round name for a woman we imagine is also round and jolly and homely, wrote Adrian Searle in The Guardian in 2007, in one of the s...
