Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland: an ‘odd pairing’ for an exhibition?

At first glance, Beryl Cook (1926-2008) and Tom of Finland (1920- 1991) might seem “like an odd pairing for an exhibition”, said Osman Can Yerebakan in AnOther Magazine. The former was a hobby painter from Plymouth whose jolly depictions of “voluptuous small-town ladies” became extremely popular in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s; the latter, a gay Finnish emigrant to America who fetishised biker culture and created “euphoric” black-and-white fantasies of “sexual encounters between leather-clad hunks”.

Nevertheless, this show insists that the two shared more than a roughly contemporaneous lifespan: both artists, the exhibition’s curators point out, focused on curvy bodies and extravagant outfits; both examine unfiltered desires, if in very different ways. While Tom of Finland was explicit with his sexuality, Cook hid hers behind “tongue-in-cheek depictions of everyday life”. The result is a small but fascinating display that generates an “unlikely synergy”.

Tom of Finland – born Touko Valio Laaksonen – “pushes macho musculature and hyper-male bravado to an erotic extreme”, said Eddy Frankel in Time Out. The “leather-clad bikers” he draws in his distinctive style “bulge and ripple”, his focus somehow always on their crotches. It’s an idiosyncratic vision of “idealised masculinity”. Beryl Cook, meanwhile, provides a display of “everyday British bawdiness”, perfectly capturing the Saturday-night atmosphere of her hometown, Plymouth: the women in her pictures are “big and buxom”, the men much the same. There are “big ladies dressed as maids” parading outside nightclubs, and women laughing at male strippers. “Both artists are brilliant in their own way” – but showing them together dilutes the uniqueness of their work. Really, this “could and should have been two separate solo exhibitions”.

Perhaps so, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. Yet both artists “say something about the social mores of the very different worlds they inhabited”. Cook was “an enduring fixture” in a working-class British culture far removed from the sophisticated art world, most at home in pubs and greasy spoons – though she also painted, for instance, a Marseille sex worker walking her dogs, and a pair of “fur-coated lesbian ladies off for a martini” in New York. Tom, meanwhile, not only documented the underground gay world he lived in, but did much to “shape that culture’s codes, its look and behaviour” with his hyper-masculine construction workers, lumberjacks, cops and prisoners. 

Both created art that was non- judgemental and packed with incidental detail. Both, in their own ways, “wanted to give pleasure”, and neither had time for “moral hypocrisy” – Cook, it’s worth noting, was a long-standing “gay ally”. This is a small show, but “I wouldn’t want more” – it’s fitting for a pair of artists who are “minor but good fun”.

At Studio Voltaire, London SW4. Until 25 August