Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland’s resonant sensuousness

At London’s Studio Voltaire, director Joe Scotland pairs the British artist’s depiction of female joy with the Finnish illustrator’s scenes of gay seduction

Last year, Joe Scotland, the director of Studio Voltaire in London, was on a video call with the granddaughter of the late British artist Beryl Cook (1926–2008). Scotland has been a fan of Cook’s work for a long time – going against an art-world snobbery that has long regarded her paintings of big women and working-class life as mere seaside humor. Having her work on view as Studio Voltaire hits its 30th anniversary seemed a fitting echo to the institution’s history of irreverence. But that wasn’t to be all.

During the conversation, Scotland broached his idea of showing Cook’s work alongside that of Tom of Finland (1920–1991). “I saw Sophie [Howe, Beryl Cook’s granddaughter] typing the name into Google and her eyes widened. She said she’d have to talk to her dad.” On the screen would have been Tom’s drawings of muscle-bound, leather-clad men, many sporting enormous erections, indulging in outdoor sex, or having their bottoms spanked. “We were worried we had offended them, but then the family came back very quickly and they had all agreed that Beryl would have loved the idea.”

Studio Voltaire

“We are not being shy with the work: Some of the more recent presentations of Tom’s work have been a bit PG – we are going XXX. When we shared the near-final list of works with Beryl’s family I was again nervous, but they were totally onboard.”

“They understood it contextualized Beryl’s work in relation to LGBT history and representation. Beryl was a straight woman with a husband and children but there are paintings of Gay bars and clubs; most of her friends were Gay men and women.”

Both Cook and Tom of Finland were self-taught, and their careers were initially centered on illustration and commercial commissions. Tom of Finland first started submitting his drawings to Physique Pictorial, an American Gay magazine masquerading as a fitness title, when he was 36. Mailing the work from his home in Finland, he used Tom as a pseudonym. Cook, six years his junior, was a former model and showgirl who was running a guesthouse in Plymouth on England’s south coast when she had her first show in 1975 at the local arts center. It led to illustrations for The Sunday Times and other media, and spawned a plethora of merchandise from prints and books to postcards and tea towels.

Tom of Finland ran his career as a cottage industry, says Nicola Wright, the curator at Studio Voltaire. “Tom would draw in series. The first images, which were the cleaner ones, would appear in a title like Physique Pictorial; you’d have to write in and send money in order to access the more explicit pictures. A lot of his work was distributed and bootlegged that way. And then, Tom himself was also distributing the work by himself, literally gifting drawings to men that he liked.” Cook was equally generous. “Going through her archives we found that she replied to every single one of the fan letters she received. Each is dated and signed as to when she replied to them, and what was sent back,” Wright says. “Lots of them are people writing ‘I love your work, but I can’t afford a painting. Would you sign this postcard for me instead? Would you send me a postcard for my collection?’ There’s so much care put into that correspondence.”

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Published: 15th July 2024

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