Beryl Cook Exhibition at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery

My friend Julie and I had intended to go for a walk this afternoon, but the weather was grim so we had a last minute change of plan and went to the City Museum to see the exhibition of paintings  by Beryl Cook.

Cook was a self-taught artist who was given a child’s paint box for her 40th birthday and embarked upon a career painting 'ordinary people enjoying themselves'. Her early efforts failed to satisfy her. 'I expected to paint like Stanley Spencer. It was a great disappointment to me when I realised that I didn’t.' 

The Art Establishment never thought much of her output either. 'I know there are some artists who look down on my work,' Cook said, 'and when you compare mine with some of the others, I can see what they’re getting at.'

Wandering around the gallery, I found myself wondering whether Robert Lenkiewicz, a fellow Plymouth artist whose work was exhibited in the RWA a couple of months ago, and Cook knew each other.  They were contemporaries, both figurative painters, both deeply unfashionable in artistic circles, but popular with the public.  Their work also shares a distinct sense of humour, although Lenkiewicz's is far more profound.   

And yet I liked Beryl Cook's best paintings.  For all that they lack subtlety and nuance, they achieve the artist's aim of making people feel more cheery for looking at them.   I even found myself coveting 'Dancing Couple' with its stylised symmetry (which definitely reminded me of Stanley Spencer) and 'In the Snug' which was painted in the historic Bristol harbourside pub, the Nova Scotia. And following a post-exhibition mug of tea and shared slice of coffee and walnut cake, even this wash-out of a summer Sunday didn't seem quite as dreary.   

Tipping the balance

It’s been an eventful few days.  On Thursday night I had a phone call from Daughter No 2 to say that she was stuck on a bus in the middle of Stokes Croft while a pitched battle raged on all sides.  The road was closed, there were police with riot shields everywhere, and it was getting hairy.  Luckily, I hadn’t had much to drink so was able to drive down and extricate her. 

Apparently, 160 police, some of them drafted in from South Wales, were needed to help arrest four squatters whom security guards working at the brand new branch of Tescos (which most locals oppose) claimed were making petrol bombs.  The result was a pitched battle involving an estimated 300 protesters which lasted most of Thursday night.   

It's all starting to feel very much like the 80s.  

In contrast, the next day was lit up by the humanity of the Robert Lenkiewicz exhibition at the RWEA, followed by another jaunt on Saturday, chauffeuring my elder son to the O2 to see three Robot Wars shows.  (Being his Personal Assistant means that I get to drive all over the country in pursuit of his obsession, and whilst finding things to do in Barnsley on a freezing, wet Sunday afternoon in February can be a challenge, there’s no such problem with London.)  I had company too, in the shape of my younger son who had come along for the ride.  Unlike me, he’d already been to the Imperial War Museum but was keen to revisit, so that’s where we went.  

There was a lot to see that was disturbing, but the most horrifying part of our visit was the Holocaust exhibition.  Going round, I remembered the first time I ever heard that word and learnt what it meant.  I must have been in my very early teens, and was sat at our utility dining table doing my homework when Panorama came on.  It was such a shock. My brain couldn’t take in what it was seeing, and my assignment went undone.  Since then I’ve been to Dachau and Yad Vashem, but am still no closer to comprehending any of it.

Every day atrocity. You have to wonder what it will ever take for us to value our differences and live in peace.

Death and the Painter: Robert Lenkiewicz Still Lives

On the way into the Royal Academy of the West of England’s latest exhibition, I misread the banner over the door.  ‘Robert Lenkiewicz Still Lives’, it declared.  I started.  But he died a few years back, at the horribly early age of 60 or so – didn’t he?

My momentary confusion is understandable given that Lenkiewicz did once fake his own death in order to publicise a forthcoming exhibition on that very topic.  I know this because every summer throughout the 70s and 80s when I was down in Devon and local newscasters were pleading nightly for somebody to contact them with news, Lenkiewicz’s eccentricities were constantly on screen.  Another of his more notorious acts that caused a huge stir was the post-mortem embalming of his friend and model, Edwin Mackenzie aka ‘Diogenes’, ‘for use as a human paperweight’. 

Add to this the scandal of many wives, lovers and children; a propensity to surround himself with vagrants and addicts; his apparent penury (although he ended up leaving over £6,000,000); such challenging subject-matter as mental disability, suicide, old age, and sexual behaviour; and, worst of all, the fact that his art is (whisper it) figurative, and it maybe isn’t surprising that it sometimes slips under the radar. 

But what a shame that this is the case.  I know little about art, so approach it with the most basic of requirements: what determines whether I find a work engaging or not is whether it excites an emotional response.  So whilst Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy leaves me cold and the Chapman Brothers soon pall, Lenkiewicz can exalt and humble me, charm and repel, arouse curiosity, concern and a determination to make the most of the time left to me. 

Death plays a major role in the work of all the above artists, but it is Lenkiewicz’s tenderness, the humanity with which he depicts our mortality, his refusal to avert his gaze, that is so affecting.  We too are made to look upon Death, not just in the form of ubiquitous memento mori (skulls and hovering intimations of figures on the edges of his canvases), but also literally in the case of Diogenes, naked but for his dignity, and as distant in time as Lindow Man or an Egyptian Mummy.  I was reminded of Yossarian’s assertion in Catch-22 (the film, I think, rather than the book): ‘Well, he died. You don't get any older than that.’ 

Good, then, to see the old man alive and sparkling elsewhere in the exhibition, gazing out of this and that work, alone or with his fellow vagrants or the artist himself.  There is a joyous defiance in so many of Lenkiewicz’s sitters – the self-possessed young Muses, lovers and offspring; the elderly who return your gaze with equanimity; the terminally sick and the disabled who dare you to glance away.  It is when his subjects look askance that I feel alarm and discomfiture – the parents of disabled children, whose plight I can identify with so well; those close to death who don’t look back, who seem already to have slipped behind an invisible glass screen.    

And Lenkiewicz’s own gaze fixed unwaveringly on things we might prefer not to examine closely, such as the subject matter of the diptych Still-Born Child in Kitchen.  In one panel there is an almost burly-looking, purplish newborn lying in a bowl, still attached to its placenta, against a sterile and mechanical backdrop of white kitchen appliances; in the other, members of the artist’s family, including very young children, standing and sitting around while the artist avidly stuffs raw umbilical cord into his mouth, the remainder of the placenta flopping on his lap like a grotesquely swollen scrotum.  I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, when I would have preferred to turn away.  Is the father celebrating the birth of his dead baby? Is he celebrating its death? Given that it is part of a project, does the diptych have a wider symbolic significance, or is it just a fellatory joke?

A revelation to me was Lenkiewicz’s mastery of light.  The highlights in a young woman’s hair, the fringes of another’s shawl, the satiny sheen of a coat lining all sensuously, deliciously depicted.  Also, the extent to which he was in thrall to the Great Masters: work after work described as being influenced by this or that painting in the National Gallery, which Robert had haunted as a young man.  I plan to go on a bit of an odyssey with him over the next few months, and also to return to the exhibition at least once more before it closes at the end of May.  For all that it is about death, this is the stuff of life and living.