Beryl Cook

Now that Beryl Cook has died there seems to be a much greater interest in her paintings than before. Why is that? What is so interesting today in her works that wasn't so interesting yesterday? Is it something to do with the art market? I don't see how that can be since the art market depends surely on what is popular. So, I ask again, why is Beryl Cook taken more seriously as an artist today than before when she was alive?
She has always been popular with "the ordinary person" for a long time, yet the cognescenti have never taken her work seriously, deriding it as trite or "like seaside postcards" that anybody could paint. She didn't "say anything" through her works, except the obvious - that that's how life looks to me. She could never be hung next to serious artists. She would be completely out of place in The Tate for example.
But now she has died maybe she has achieved some kind of status that she could not have attained when she was alive. Simply because she is dead?
A quite famous poet and playwright came to Cardiff University some years ago as "Writer in Residence". He put on a few new plays of his, got involved in student activities, worked hard to help writers with their work; but, he told a friend of mine, "no one in the English Department of the University wants to know me."
He wondered why this was so. So did my friend.
I told him: "They'd have been interested in him, maybe, if he had been dead."
Dead men don't answer back. Dead men have no theories about their work. Dead men - and dead women like Beryl Cook - have no way of saying "what you are saying about me is just not true."
Beryl Cook never wanted her works to be hung in The Tate. I hope they never are - for her sake.

To Gloria, who commented on my "Edgar Wallace" blog of 21st. April: I was wrong. I've looked up the reference in Emlyn Williams's autobiography, "Emlyn", and not found that Edgar Wallace was involved in the sacking of someone who was gay; though there is a section in which a man, found to be gay, is ignored or maybe asked to leave, or just leaves - there is a little confusion there I think. It's on Pages 124 and 125 of the book and concerns an actor named Brian Aherne (whom I recalled, erroneously, was EdgarWallace). Hope that clears it up.