Too Popular, Too Female, Too Joyful: Why Beryl Cook Is Dismissed by the Art Establishment

Posted by Anita

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 snottiest opinion pieces one is ever likely to read. Yet, as Joe Whitlock Blundell, who met the artist several times, wrote in 'Beryl Cook, The Bumper Edition': 'She is not plump and extrovert, the life and soul of the party, the popular image arising from the paintings. On the contrary, she is quite tall and reserved.' It was good of him to make that clear, but would he have said the same about a male artist? It's doubtful. It's also worth noting that 'Beryl Cook, the Bumper Edition', being a text in which the artist describes her paintings and how they came about, was subtitled in the introduction as 'Beryl Cook. A Personal Memoir'. Apart from quibbling that all memoirs are personal (aren't they?), one may also question the editorial decision to call the memoir 'bumper': would any other visual artist's memoir be called something so trashy and tabloidesque? Clearly, Beryl Cook's memoir was deemed not as deserving as one written by a male artist—or any other female artist, for that matter.

Beryl Cook in her youth. Hardly 'the popular image arising from the paintings'.

Cook is unique in the disdain, contempt and snobbery she experienced at the hands of the art establishment in her lifetime. That Cook's work wasn't—and still isn't—given enough serious consideration is obvious, and many forget that there's more to it than jolly fat figures enjoying a pint in a pub. Curators of 'Pride and Joy' say a reassessment is long overdue: not only do Cook's artworks demonstrate a technical mastery that has been overlooked, but her depictions of LGBTQ+ and other communities also deserve recognition. Yes, pubs feature heavily as settings for British working-class pleasures—booze, fags, pool, dancing, the joy of going out—there's plenty of all that at 'Pride and Joy'. But among the 80 artworks on display, visitors will see paintings of a drag queen cabaret, and two dominatrices: one in a peek-a-boo bra and crotchless knickers (1, below), the other spanking a grey-haired man in women's underwear and high heels (2). Each of these people is middle-aged (at least), but one of the most striking things about Cook's oeuvre is how women are centred. Whereas men mostly function as accessories to female pleasure, women are unashamed agents of appetite, for both sex and food. Take the muscular marine in skimpy shorts being eyed up by a woman scoffing a sausage sandwich in 'Elvira's Café'. Or the stripper exposing the contents of his G-string to a crowd of delighted women (3). Here, the women control the narrative, while the men are reduced to the sum of their parts.

Perhaps Cook found the convex curves of larger bodies more satisfying to paint (it is also said that she preferred to fill her canvasses with larger bodies so as to avoid painting backgrounds). Rendered in oil in her signature colourful manner, these stylised body shapes are a form of visual democracy. Cook fills her surfaces with them, cramming them in tangled choreographies, which reflect Cook's penchant for people watching. They are like puzzles—where do they begin or end? 'Pride and Joy' includes two boards on which Cook used grids to draft her scenes (4, 5). Like x-rays, they show what lay beneath the paintings, and the more you look, the more you see. Among the holidaymakers in 'Beach at Looe' (6), for example, two young men compete for a girl's attention. 'Reading Sunday Papers' (7) shows two people in deckchairs reading sensational tabloids, as another changes into their cossie. This seemingly simple scene not only demonstrates complex technical composition, but also the use of mixed media: real newsprint is collaged into the piece, so as to foreshorten the newspapers in the hands of the people reading them. 'Beryl Sleeping' (8), a self-portrait, too, includes a piece of wallpaper from her living room for the wall in the painting, along with a scrap of newspaper forming the page of one of the books on her coffee table. Another self-portrait uses joke teeth. Cook regularly used household 'found' materials, such as ping pong balls and egg cartons, in her work, while toilet seats and a roller blind functioned as canvasses. 'Bowling' was painted on a circular breadboard.

A sex show in London's Soho, sex workers in Amsterdam's red-light district, along with scenes from her travels to Cuba and the USA, show that Cook didn't restrict herself to Plymouth. When men paint their immediate locale, they're chroniclers of social realism; yet, when a woman paints bingo players, a tattoo parlour, or a graffiti-covered bus shelter, her work is reduced to saucy postcard smut—the seaside landlady is never far away. When it comes to Cook, there's a feeling that there's always something to prove; however, as a tender family scene inspired by Filippo Lippi's 'Madonna with Child and Two Angels' (9) shows, complete with triangulated gazes and idealised Renaissance landscape in the background, Cook formulated her own apprenticeship. This is demonstrated too in homages to de Lempicka, Modigliani. and Alfred Wallis—all painted by Cook, and all on display at the exhibition. Works by Rubens, Brueghel, Edward Burra, and Stanley Spencer—Cook's influences—are an additional draw, not that cook needs them. Her work is more than capable of standing on its own.

A life-size 'selfie-ready' sculpture of a figure from Beryl Cook's painting
'Sailors and Seagulls'.

Beyond the exhibition space, 'Pride and Joy' also comprises life-size 'selfie-ready' sculptures of figures from her paintings—if you know the paintings, you'll know how to pose with them. These sculptures are positioned throughout Plymouth, the city synonymous with Cook, in locations that Cook herself would have frequented—the Barbican cobbles, the pannier market, the bowling green, the Dolphin pub. Yet this isn't the only way the exhibition is continued beyond the walls of the gallery. The day I went to 'Pride and Joy' the exhibition space was packed with people keen to see Beryl Cook paintings in the flesh. Among them were numerous women of middle age and beyond, who bore more than a striking resemblance to the artist and, with their cropped grey hair and round gasses, could almost be said to be Beryl Cook look-alikes. Out in the streets, suddenly I could see Beryl Cook characters everywhere. Any one of us could be in her paintings.

Female, self-taught, working class, speaking without a plum in her mouth, and—crucially—popular, Beryl Cook was never short of reasons for irritating the art establishment. In the 2019 Bridget Riley documentary 'Painting the Line', which I watched on BBC iPlayer, Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff made my ears burn when explaining how the sudden explosion in popularity of optical art in the sixties "made art people nervous that their little sanctuary was getting taken over by the barbarians" (yes, he really did say that out loud). That's a very old move in British culture, especially by magisterial old white men—and women—whose lives are far removed from those depicted in the paintings of Beryl Cook: mock the people, then call it taste, and conflate accessibility with inferiority. When the plebs get a piece of the action, the middle classes don't like it. Art as a prestige economy gets destabilised when the wrong people—especially women—take up space (and in Cook's case, her women are big, loud, sexual, and wear fake leopard skin). Eschewing Cook's work presumably legitimises one as a sophisticate, because snobbery is supposed to be a mark of intellectual seriousness. And hence another reason why Cook triggers 'art people': her work doesn't need a snooty art historian to couch it in pretentious waffle. The art world survives by keeping certain artists elevated, mysterious, and out of reach, so that art remains a currency of prestige rather than a shared human experience; yet, Beryl Cook demolishes that carefully constructed hierarchy. The world of highbrow pretence may sneer, but Cook proves art can be culturally powerful without being 'approved’.

As if to prove the point, the weekend I went to 'Pride and Joy', a Cook artwork appeared on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine again, almost fifty years to the day since the one in 1976. Peter Mandelson was photographed in his kitchen, a Beryl Cook print displayed prominently on the wall (above). A reproduction of an original painting titled 'Escargot pour trois' (10), the print features a man and a woman in a French restaurant enjoying escargots and white wine as their fluffy poodle looks on, also about to enjoy a tasty morsel. It is a charming scene, one also designed to raise a smile. Yet, in the context of Mandelson's household, it makes me laugh for additional reasons. Not only are the French title and bourgeois setting presumably deemed middle-class enough to be placed on a politician's wall, in this particular domestic context the juxtaposition produces cognitive dissonance. The print is more than decoration; it is a visual PR device framing Mandelson as harmless—or, as Adrian Searle might put it, 'homely'. Cook's name and image are being co-opted to sanitise and soften a figure whose public image is anything but homely or joyful.

The establishment find Beryl Cook useful when it suits.