Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland embrace excess

BERYL COOK Lady of Marseille, c. 1990

They’re not two artists you’d immediately pair together. But a new exhibition is showcasing previously unearthed similarities between Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland – namely, big bums and an affinity with Queer culture.

When South London gallery Studio Voltaire announced it would be pairing Britain’s lauded-and-loathed painter Beryl Cook with Finnish Leather icon Tom of Finland, the art world screwed its face in bemusement.

Their main point of contention? The fact that Tom was an erotic artist infamous for his buffed-up, proto-Daddy depictions, while Cook was a painter who documented the visual precursor to hun culture, seaside frolics and hen parties. Hardly kindred spirits.

But scratch beneath the canvas and you’ll soon see they were both creative underdogs, using self-taught skills to chart the kind of ​“low culture” that blue-chip gallery gatekeepers wouldn’t dare touch. Drawing jackbooted fantasies from wartime memories or photographs of lovers in the ​1950s, Tom risked jail time for criminal obscenity. Meanwhile, Cook was painting the working communities of Plymouth and Brits abroad, honing in on sex workers, sausage-bap caffs and proudly voluptuous, beer-guzzling girls.

“In Tom’s earlier decades of his career, he had an intended audience – young developing homosexual males, [and aimed] to provide them with some positive role modelling,” says Durk Dehner, president and cofounder of Tom of Finland Foundation, noting the lack of proud, Gay male visibility in post-war war culture. ​“With Beryl’s work, she too enjoyed the jolliness of the physical being and the appreciation of having a sexual nature and indulging in one’s physical self.”

Visually, this is immediately apparent – much like Tom, Cook caricatured her subjects with bulging buttocks and breasts. But she was also deeply involved in a nascent Queer culture. Where Tom helped define and hone the Gay, macho archetype, Cook was busy documenting the UK’s underground Gay bars during the whispered days before decriminalisation. Plymouth’s fabled Lockyer Tavern, home to a secret ​“back bar”, is a perennial setting in Cook’s works, often lined with effete, gesturing dandies posed before a smiling landlady.

​“I knew a number of my grandmother’s friends were Gay when I was growing up,” Cook’s granddaughter Sophie Howe says. ​“After talking with my parents, we realised that she had far more friends in the Queer community than we first thought. She even painted a leather bar!”

SEE THE COMPLETE ARTICLE BY JOE BOBOWICZ

Published: 20th August 2024

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