Caroline Coon has spent her life challenging the status quo. As part of the counterculture and punk scenes in London in the 1960s and 1970s, she advocated for the rights of the disempowered and particularly women. In addition to her activism, she has been a music journalist, a band manager (for none other than the Clash), an actor, a model and, starting when she was just five years old, a ballet dancer. Amidst all this political and creative outpouring, one thing has remained constant: painting.

‘You get to create a world that you want to see in your paintings,’ Coon, now 78, told me by telephone from her home in London. Her depictions of the human figure – male nudes especially – reveal a world imbued with a feminist point of view. Defying notions of respectability and reclaiming female sexuality, her works are the summation of a life spent fighting for justice in a misogynistic society.

This December, her paintings will be shown in the US for the first time as part of Art Basel Miami Beach, in a presentation by Stephen Friedman Gallery. It is fitting that the works will be from her ongoing beach series, spanning four decades. These paintings are bold, cheeky, and erotic. But there’s more to them than being mere eye candy. ‘The human figure has always interested me not only for its beauty, but the way it primes our eyes for a story,’ Coon says. ‘When you place a human body in a painting, immediately there’s a narrative. There’s a possibility of provoking more than just an aesthetic response.’

Coon felt called to paint male nudes in reaction to the overabundance of female nudes in art history. For all the idealized feminine forms out there, the lack of masculine ones felt like a denial of women’s libido. ‘So I decided to put the male nudes for the delectation of the female gaze, for her pleasure,’ Coon says. ‘And that means that it becomes quite political.’

In Adonis Beach (1999), five men with physiques like that of the mythic Greek lover line the shore, surfboards in hand. It’s hard not to stare – and that’s the point. Coon wants you to look, to marvel at these potent male bodies. Her liberated figures exude confidence and buoyancy. Their nakedness is rendered in sharp detail, with rippling muscles, chiseled faces, and overt genitalia.

‘The male nude is still very controversial,’ Coon says. In part due to the fragility of the male ego. She recalls a time some years ago when an art history professor – a man – came by her studio to look at her paintings. He confessed some of the work made him feel insecure. ‘And I thought that was so funny because women have gotten absolutely used to looking at the ideal form in painting,’ she says.

Her beach works possess joy and humor alongside politics. The vivid colors and stark lines burst off the canvases, evoking the elation of being oceanside. That happiness has many sources. In See, He Is Absolutely Gorgeous! (2002), a woman looks at a toweling-off man in delight. The ocean is to her back, her little, knowing smile telling us she’s chosen a different beautiful view.

Coon was surrounded by various forms of creativity from a young age. She was born in London in 1945, and at age five she was sent to boarding school, where she studied ballet. It opened up her world. At that time, women were usually expected to marry and raise children, not work, she says. But she was surrounded by women who were earning a living through their art as dancers, stage designers, choreographers, ‘which was a wonderful grounding for me as a child.’

She studied fine art at Central Saint Martins in the mid-1960s and dove into political activism. In 1967, Coon cofounded Release, a UK-based charity that helps those arrested on drug-related charges with legal advice. It still exists today.

Coon became a pivotal figure in the punk movement in London in the 1970s. She wrote for the iconic weekly magazine Melody Maker. She interviewed musicians, including Yoko Ono and Joan Armatrading. She took photos and designed album covers. But by the early 1980s, she wanted to focus on her own art and painting specifically. She took up sex work as a means of supporting herself, an experience she chronicles in Laid Bare – Diary – 1983-1984. She has spoken often about the need to make women safer by decriminalizing sex work – a theme that also shows up in her paintings, namely her ‘brothel’ series.

Like her beach scenes, Coon’s other paintings are steeped in a feminist awareness that all art is political. ‘I’ve never seen political activism as separate from art,’ she says. All creative work comes from a point of view, and to deny having one is only kidding oneself. ‘Not putting politics in your work, or imagining that you’re not putting politics into your work, is also kind of a political statement,’ she says. That’s why for the last 50 years, she has turned to depictions of the body over and over again: We know it’s a battleground.

The world is finally – quite belatedly – catching on to Coon’s radical visions. Her first solo painting show was in 2018, when she was 73 years old, fabulously titled ‘The Great Offender' at The Gallery Liverpool. The following year, Tramps gallery brought the show to London, widening her audience. She’s included in Tate Britain’s ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990’, which just opened.

‘Art can change society,’ Coon says. Her commanding nude figures represent a more just one, where women don’t fear their sexuality, where they can find freedom in pleasure. It’s through provocative work like Coon’s that progress is made and stereotypes are dismantled. But it takes effort, and sometimes a maddening amount of patience.

‘Persistence is so important, and it’s hard to do,’ she said. ‘But that’s the whole point, right? That you keep going.’

Caroline Coon is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery (London, New York). 

Grace Edquist is an art writer and the copy director of Vogue magazine. She lives in New York City.

Published on November 10, 2023.

Captions for full-bleed images (from top to bottom): 1. Caroline Coon, Paradise Beach, 1981. Photo by Todd-White Art
Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery. 2. Caroline Coon, Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster
Road: Adonis of The Bike, 2007. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery. 3. Caroline Coon, Rugged Defensive Play, 2020. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery.