Beryl Cook: Artist or Entertainer?
A shy, self-taught, gloriously rude seaside landlady. But was she a serious artist? In Beryl Cook's centenary year, Louisa Buck heads to Plymouth to find out.
Beryl Cook was adored by the public and dismissed for decades by the art world. Prints, postcards and calendars of her plump, joyful, gloriously ribald figures sold in their millions, while critics looked the other way.
In her centenary year, art critic Louisa Buck travels to Plymouth, where a major exhibition at The Box gives Cook the retrospective she never had, and asks - serious artist, or entertainer?
It began in 1976, when a packet of transparencies reached Hunter Davies, then editor of the Sunday Times Magazine. He put a Beryl Cook pub scene on the cover. His art department called it rubbish, derivative, amateur. The readers adored her. Within a year she was famous.
In Plymouth, Louisa uncovers an artist far more complex and serious than her reputation suggests. A woman too shy to attend her own openings, who once claimed her son had done the paintings. A self-taught latecomer who began in her 40s and left over 500 canvases, built from sketches made secretly on cards in her handbag. And a quiet chronicler of Plymouth's queer scene who, in 1978, gave the city museum a painting of a clandestine back-room gay bar.
Fifty years on, the art world is finally catching up.
Featuring Beryl Cook's son John and daughter-in-law Teresa, curator Terah Walkup, artist Jeremy Deller, gallerist Joe Scotland, biographer Hilary Bracegirdle, granddaughter Sophie Howe, and Beryl Cook herself, in archive.
Presenter: Louisa Buck
Producer: Victoria Ferran
Executive producer: Susan Marling
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4
On radio
Broadcast
- Tue 1 Sep 202616:00BBC Radio 4
