Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy review – a raunchy display of bouncing breasts, grinning smokers and a splash of BDSM | Art and design

gGenerally speaking, you get two versions of England in art: either rural scenes, rolling hills, babbling streams and gambling sheep – or it is oppressed, defeated, abject poverty and misery. But Beryl Cook saw something else in all the drizzle and gray of this damp old country: she saw joy.

The thing is, joy doesn’t carry the same critical and conceptual weight in art circles as more serious topics, so Cook was always a bit overlooked by the art public. They saw in them postcards and posters for the unwashed and uncultivated masses, not high art for the high-minded. But she didn’t care: she succeeded as a self-taught documenter of English life despite any disdain she may have encountered. Now, on her 100th birthday, her hometown of Plymouth is throwing her a big celebratory party.

Cook ran a guesthouse in Hue, the city’s historic waterfront district, and in the 1970s he filled it with paintings. Her previous works here are a bit shy, uncertain and chaotic. But by 1974, Beryl was Beryl, confident and confident. All the hallmarks are there: drinking, dancing, dressing up, laughing. Their characters are all big and stocky, their chests explode, their eyes are cartoon blobs, and their noses are hot dog blobs. They all look the same, and their uniformity – each character is distinguished only by their hairstyle or clothing – gives them a kind of universality, and instantly recognizability.

In 1975, an antiques dealer friend offered to take some of the paintings off her hands to free up some space, and before she knew it, she had great success: she had a show at the Plymouth Arts Center that same year, and then a larger show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London a year later. Soon her work was appearing on magazine covers. She began writing children’s books and was awarded an OBE.

The appeal is very clear. Cook makes life look fun. The famous things here are all things bawdy, drunken, knee-slapping and titillating. Revelers fall down during karaoke, laughing women walk out of a bar over a chicken, girls in short skirts play pool or pee laughing when a stripper rips a jockstrap off his clothes. This is a world of pints, laughter and dancing. Gay pubs, bars and cabarets; A public space where private desires can be fulfilled.

Things get more dangerous. There are two funny pictures of dominatrixes using a whip. Then a wall of self-portraits shows Cook indulging her and her husband’s fantasies. They dance naked while wearing reading glasses. She smokes in lingerie, twirls balls while dressed as a cheerleader.

And she’s funny too, really funny. An elderly couple eats chips at a bus stop covered in graffiti that says “Nigel is a playboy” and “I fucked a frog.” In the background of her painting of Plymouth Argyle FC scoring a goal, you can see a rival fan choking an Argyle fan amid the celebrations. It’s great, hilarious, ridiculous.

There are also the basic everyday things: bingo halls, Dino Road workers cleaning drains, cheeky sailors smoking, women shopping in the market, nurses pulling a stretcher, and everyone smiling and smiling in every panel.

The rest of the show looks at her inspirations (Bruegel and Rubens, apparently) and her experiments with sculpture (including some very elegantly painted pigeon chairs). But the real surprise is how serious and emotional some of the work here is. Cook paints her son and husband feeling the roof of the shed, her granddaughter on the swing, her daughter-in-law preparing cups of tea, everyone smiling sweetly. It is full of true and true love. This happens again and again in the intimate paintings of her family. It’s beautiful without being saccharine and gross.

Across town, a companion exhibition at Karst Gallery showcases works by contemporary artists with some thematic or aesthetic connections to Cook: the brilliant, satirical caricatures of Olivia Sterling; the hyper-accurate celebrations of Flo Brooks’ LGBTQ life; Hypnotic, delirious minimalism by Rhys Koren. It’s brilliant, clever, fun and more than worth the trip.

Cook’s body-positive depictions of everyday life in England allowed people to see their lives—whether sailors or strippers, gay or straight—reflected in art. And while every serious artist in the country was trying to document the dreariness of English working-class life, Cook was there saying: “Cheer up, mate, have a pint!”

Its primary goal is not just that the ordinary can be extraordinary. This is normal He is rare; That life is amazing, full of laughter, joy and fun. Survival is a precious and wonderful thing, and we should spend every possible second celebrating it.