Beryl Cook: a homely, round name for a woman we imagine is also round and jolly and homely. Her art depresses me. I thought I would be able to summon some sort of enthusiasm for its Englishness, its playfulness, its sauciness. But I can't. The best that can be said is that Cook celebrates ordinariness - large women with large appetites, broad-shouldered men, hen parties, booze-ups, dances, dinners, shopping, sunbathing, a bit of slap and tickle. At least ordinariness in Cook's art is more various than one might think: the bloke next door is a shoe fetishist, and even Saga members like a bit of kinky sex. All the girls, and some of the boys, like a sailor. Cook's is an art without any pretentions other than to please.
I am, you might say, missing the point of this national treasure, who, we are constantly reminded, is one of Britain's best-loved artists. Her paintings, prints, greeting cards and books fly off the shelves. They apparently cheer people up and make them feel good about themselves. There's no malice in her, and there never was much ambition either. What could be wrong with that?
What's wrong is that it is not enough. A new exhibition of more than 40 paintings by Cook has opened at the Baltic, Gateshead. Cook, a seaside landlady who was "discovered" as an amateur painter in the 1960s, is an unlikely artist to be showing there - unless, that is, the gallery wants to show how inclusive it is, and to make one more desperate bid to gain local popularity. One might have thought the battle for inclusiveness had already been won.
But the Baltic has lurched from crisis to crisis since it opened, and has had three directors in five years. The thinking behind this show seems to be that because Cook's paintings are often filled with people drinking, dancing and having a wild old time, and because Newcastle and Gateshead are known as "two of the best party towns in the world" (according to Jérôme Sans, associate director of art at Baltic), there is a real connection with Cook's work.
Sans, who was previously at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, is stretching it a bit. On my visit, most of the people looking at Cook's show were hardly the types to go binge-drinking through the night and fighting in the streets till all hours. Sans also expresses surprise, in his catalogue interview with the artist, that she has not had more museum shows. I am not sure if he is being serious, or disingenuous. Nor does Sans mount the spirited defence of Cook we might expect. That task is left to Jess Wilder, co-director of the Portal Gallery. It is unusual that a public institution should delegate its main catalogue essay for the exhibition to the artist's commercial dealer, whose gallery has been showing her work for more than 30 years.
I suppose, because the artist is Beryl Cook, nobody really minds; Cook is not considered a serious artist. This is always a risky judgement to make: who knows what is or is not serious, what will or will not be taken seriously one day. We might ask what serious means nowadays; it can mean nothing more than expensive. In any case, Cook's fans and collectors know what they like and know what they want, and many of them have come a long way to visit the Baltic, where they might also be alarmed by Maurizio Cattelan's gigantic cat's skeleton on the top floor, and another strange and funny exhibition about summer holidays spent taking mud-baths in Ukraine. It is the silly season at the Baltic.
I suppose the word for Cook's work is "affirmative". Another word would be "cliched": Cubans smoke cigars and drive wrecked 1950s cars. Argentinians like to tango. There are sleazy bars and prostitutes at the harbour end of the Ramblas in Barcelona. Cats like fish. Women sometimes get riotously drunk and bawdy. We know because Cook's paintings show us. We knew anyway, and so feel comforted in our view of the world. It is all as cloying as a cup of Ovaltine.
A few years ago, the BBC turned Cook's bibulous, good-time Plymouth pub regulars into a two-part animated cartoon, Bosom Pals, targeted at adults and featuring the voices of Dawn French, Alison Steadman and Timothy Spall. Comedian Victoria Wood once called Cook "Rubens with jokes". Her work is more like Mike Leigh without humour, tears, wit, embarrassment or pain. It is Nil By Mouth without violence or swearing. It is a soap opera without depth, or any discernible storyline at all. Cook's characters may appear fat, well-upholstered, plump, plentiful or even Rubenesque, but they are strictly one-dimensional.
Cook's key influences, if you can call them that, have been the later paintings of Stanley Spencer and the watercolours of Edward Burra. Both artists were driven, and a bit peculiar. Cook is neither. She also singles out as an influence an early 1970s Hanna-Barbera animated cartoon series called Help! ... It's the Hair Bear Bunch!, about a group of hippy bears living in a zoo. The constant refrain is that Cook is self-taught, but that doesn't make her Le Douanier Rousseau.
Cook, her supporters would like us to think, has taken the place of LS Lowry as the nation's favourite artist. Lowry was a man whose misanthropy was in inverse proportion to the supposed humanity of his art. Everyone knows - or should know by now - that Lowry's art had a dark side, and claims that he was a sort of cloth-capped northern innocent are a fiction. Lowry was much better, more perverse and weirder than many people assume. Trumpeting him as a local hero only diminishes his work. Cook is not in the same league. Her figures might have more umph, but Lowry's had more presence.
One might think of Cook's interchangeable big women as corpulent cousins to the bulging fatties of Colombian artist Fernando Botero, or the big, brooding figures that William Roberts painted. Botero has latterly been painting the victims of Abu Ghraib. Cook won't even paint someone who looks as though they are suffering a mild headache, let alone an electrode to the genitals. Not for her the miseries of the human condition or intimations of mortality - excepting a single image of a woman, perhaps Cook herself, being wheeled pleasantly along on a hospital gurney by a bevy of chubby nurses. Aside from this, there is no pain in her world, except the sort administered by Miss Whiplash, in Cook's paintings derived from the salacious anecdotes of Cynthia Payne, the suburban madam who ran her steamy little parties on "luncheon vouchers". "Anyone for a whipping?" the dominatrix announces.
Cook's art was always more saucy than kinky, closer to the seaside postcard. Her women belong in the same world as Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies, the Two Fat Ladies of television cookery fame, Hetty Wainthrop, Elsie Tanner, Mrs Merton and, of course, Cynthia Payne. Weirdly, photographs of Cook make her look very like the late Mary Whitehouse in her prime. Pam Ayres should have written Cook's catalogue. She makes art for people who don't much like art, which is fine. Perhaps the only people who don't like her paintings are sniffy art critics like me - though the British Medical Association would probably have a go at her for so many images of the happily overweight, and for all the positive depictions of smoking and drinking.
After looking too long at Cook, I'm apt to feel a bit queasy. The theatricality with which Sans has mounted the show adds to this. The paintings are all hung close together, sometimes two deep, in a room with black walls, and the paintings are spotlit. This has the effect of making everything look bilious and over-rich. In the middle of the room, two sofas sit back to back, so one may enjoy the work at a distance, or by looking through the catalogue. There's nothing to be gained by seeing them in the flesh. Or perhaps it is so one can enjoy the people looking at the art, and overhear their conversations. Cook's art, after all, is about people.
Say no to Cook and it shows you are an illiberal, snobbish bore, with no sense of fun. After all, everyone likes a bit of rubbishy art now and again. Worse, dissing Beryl risks incurring charges of caddish elitism, incipient ageism and a lack of humanity. Bring it on!
· Beryl Cook is at Baltic, Gateshead, until September 2. Details: 0191-478 1810 or www.balticmill.com