Beryl Cook Gets a Major Plymouth Survey as Institutions Reconsider the Painter Long Dismissed as “Popular”
A five-meter inflatable nude drifting into a Trafalgar Square fountain is not the usual emblem of museum commemoration. Yet that was the image that led Jeremy Deller’s Triumph of Art parade last summer, staged to mark the National Gallery’s 250th anniversary — and the figure was modeled not on a canonical Old Master, but on a painting by Beryl Cook.
Cook, a self-taught British artist and former seaside guest-house proprietor, built a vast public following with scenes of exuberant, ample-bodied women and crowded social interiors. Since the 1980s, her imagery has circulated widely through mass-produced greeting cards, calendars, and prints, a popularity that for decades helped keep her at arm’s length from the institutions that shape official taste.
There are no works by Cook in the National Gallery, and none in Tate’s collection. The distance was once stated outright: in 1996, the then Tate director Nicholas Serota emphasized, “there will be no Beryl Cooks in the Tate Gallery.”
That posture has softened in recent years, as curators and artists have begun to argue for Cook’s formal intelligence and social acuity — and for the seriousness of pleasure in her work. Deller’s parade inflatable drew on Cook’s 1980 painting “Nude on a Leopard Skin Rug,” turning her signature body type into a public monument and, in effect, a provocation: what does it mean when the most visible figure in a national celebration comes from an artist long treated as unserious?
Another marker of Cook’s changing fortunes arrived in 2024, when Studio Voltaire in London mounted an exhibition pairing her with Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. Both artists were historically sidelined by the art establishment, and both are known for exaggerated, hyper-realized bodies — though aimed at very different audiences. In an interview with the Guardian at the time, Studio Voltaire director Joe Scotland said the two artists “articulate the human figure in very distinctive and hyper-realised ways,” praising their “wonderful sense of pleasure and fun and desire that is free of any sense of shame.” He also pointed to how their work opens onto questions of “gender, class, politics, body image and much more,” before adding, with a wink, that there are “joyous celebrations of some amazing bums.”
Those bodies — and the social worlds they inhabit — are now central to “Pride and Joy,” a major survey at The Box in Plymouth, the Devon coastal city where Cook lived for 40 years. The exhibition gathers paintings that unfold in pubs, clubs, and cafés, where middle-aged women eat, drink, smoke, and dress up with unapologetic flair. Cook’s scenes are comic, but not careless: they are built from keen observation of gesture, posture, and the micro-drama of social exchange. A glance held a beat too long, a foot angled in a well-shod shoe, a shoulder turned away — Cook uses such details to give each figure a distinct inner life.
The show also underscores Cook’s relationship to Plymouth’s LGBTQ+ community. She was a regular in the city’s gay bars in the 1970s and 1980s, and her depictions of their clientele — acerbic, affectionate, and alert to performance — now read as a visual document of safe spaces that have since disappeared. Cook, by temperament, preferred to watch rather than join the revelry she painted, keeping a low profile even as her work made her a household name.
Taken together, “Pride and Joy” makes a case that Cook’s accessibility was never the same thing as simplicity. Her paintings hold class and desire, humor and tenderness, in a single crowded room — and they do so with a compositional control that reproductions rarely capture. As museums and galleries continue to widen the story of figurative painting beyond the usual gatekeepers, Cook’s reassessment suggests a broader shift: pleasure, too, can be a serious subject.
“Pride and Joy” is on view at The Box in Plymouth.
