Comment | Beryl Cook UK retrospective shows there is much more to the artist than amazing bums

"They both articulate the human figure in very distinctive and hyper-realised ways. 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."

"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."

Beryl Cook, a self-taught artist and seaside guest house proprietor, created paintings of ample-figured females that became ubiquitous on mass-produced greetings cards and prints since the 1980s. Despite her popularity, major institutions like the National Gallery and Tate excluded her work, with the Tate director explicitly stating in 1996 that Cook's paintings would never enter the gallery. Recently, this institutional snobbery has diminished significantly. Cook's rehabilitation accelerated through her inclusion in Jeremy Deller's Triumph of Art parade celebrating the National Gallery's 250th anniversary, where a giant inflatable based on her work was prominently featured. A 2024 Studio Voltaire exhibition pairing Cook with Tom of Finland further legitimized her artistic contributions, with curators praising both artists for their distinctive, hyper-realized depictions of the human figure and their celebration of pleasure, desire, and exploration of gender, class, and body image.

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