Pauline Boty (March 6, 1938 – July 1, 1966) was a founder of the British Pop art movement and Britain's only notable female Pop art painter. Boty's paintings and collages often demonstrated a joy in self-assured femininity and female sexuality, and expressed overt or implicit criticism of the "man's world" in which she lived. Her rebellious art, combined with her free-spirited lifestyle, has made Boty a herald of 1970s feminism.
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Boty was born in suburban south London in 1938 into a middle-class, Catholic family. The youngest of four children, she had three older brothers and a stern father who made her keenly aware of her position as a girl.[1] In 1954 she won a scholarship to the Wimbledon School of Art where she went despite her father's disapproval (Boty's mother, on the other hand, was a frustrated artist, having been denied parental permission to attend the Slade School of Fine Art herself).[2] Boty earned an Intermediate diploma in lithography (1956) and a National Diploma in Design in stained glass (1958). Her schoolmates called her "The Wimbledon Bardot" on account of her resemblance to the French film star Brigette Bardot.[2] Encouraged by her tutor Charles Carey to explore collage techniques, Boty's painting became more experimental. Her work showed an interest in popular culture early on.[3] In 1957 one of her pieces was shown at the Young Contemporaries exhibition alongside work by Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Bridget Riley.
She studied at the School of Stained Glass at the Royal College of Art (1958–61). She had wanted to attend the School of Painting, but was dissuaded from applying as admission rates for women were much lower in that department.[4] Despite the institutionalized sexism at her college, Boty was one of the stronger students in her class, and in 1960 one of her stained glass works was included in the traveling exhibition Modern Stained Glass organized by the Arts Council. Boty continued to paint on her own in her student flat in west London and in 1959 she had three more works selected for the Young Contemporaries exhibition. During this time she also became friends with other emerging Pop artists, such as David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips and Peter Blake.
While at the Royal College of Art, Boty engaged in a number of extracurricular activities. She sang, danced, and acted in somewhat risqué college reviews, published her poetry in an alternative student magazine, and was a knowledgeable presence at the film society where she developed her interest especially in European new wave cinema.[4] She was also an active participant of the Anti-Ugly Action campaign, a group of RCA stained glass, and later architecture, students who protested against new British architecture that they considered offensive and of poor quality.[5]
The two years after graduation were perhaps Boty's most productive. She developed a signature Pop style and iconography. Her first group show, "Blake, Boty, Porter, Reeve" was held in November 1961 at A.I.A. gallery in London and was hailed as one of the first British Pop art shows. She exhibited twenty collages, including Is it a bird, is it a plane? and a rose is a rose is a rose, which demonstrated her interest in drawing from both high and low popular culture sources in her art (the first title references the Superman comic, the second quotes American ex-patriate poet Gertrude Stein).[6]
The following spring Boty, along with Blake, Boshier, and Phillips, were featured in Ken Russell's BBC film Pop Goes the Easel, which first aired on March 22, 1962. Although the documentary placed Boty at the center of the nascent British Pop art movement, unlike her male peers she did not get an opportunity to speak directly and intelligently about her work during the film.[7]
Boty's appearance on Pop Goes the Easel marked the beginning of her brief acting career. She landed roles in two Armchair Theatre plays for ITV and an episode of the BBC series Maigret. Boty also appeared on stage at the Royal Court in Day of the Prince and in Frank Hilton's Afternoon Men at the New Arts Theatre. (Boty, a regular on 'swinging 60s' club scene in London, was also a dancer on Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go!). Although acting was lucrative, it distracted her from painting, which remained her top priority. Yet the men in her life encouraged her to pursue acting, as it was a more conventional career choice for women in the early 1960s.[8] The popular press picked up on her glamorous actress persona, often undermining her legitimacy as an artist by referring to her physical charms. For example, Scene ran a front page article in November 1962 that read, "Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have large beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blonde and you have PAULINE BOTY."[9]
Her unique position as Britain's only female Pop artist gave Boty the chance to redress sexism in her life as well as her art. Her early paintings were sensual and erotic, celebrating female sexuality from a woman's point of view. Her canvases were set against vivid, colorful backgrounds and often included erogenous close-ups of red flowers, symbolic of the female sex.[10] She painted her male idols—Elvis, French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, British writer Derek Marlowe—as sex symbols, just as she did actresses Monica Vitti and Marilyn Monroe. Like Andy Warhol, she recycled publicity and press photographs of celebrities in her art. She exhibited in several more group shows before staging her first solo exhibition at Grabowski Gallery in the fall of 1963. The show was a critical success. However, Boty continued to take on additional acting jobs. She was a presenter on the radio program Public Ear in 1963-64, and in the following year she was typecast yet again in the role of 'the seductive Maria' in a BBC serial.
In June 1963, she married literary agent and television producer Clive Goodwin (1932-77[11]) after a mere ten-day romance.[12] Her marriage disappointed many, including Peter Blake and her married lover, director Philip Saville, whom she met towards the end of her student days and had worked for.[13] Their affair is said to have inspired the movie Darling[14] (1966). Boty and Goodwin's Cromwell Road flat became a central hang-out for many artists, musicians, and writers, including Bob Dylan (whom Boty brought to England)[15] Hockney, Blake, Michael White (producer of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and later Monty Python and the Holy Grail), playwright Kenneth Tynan, Troy Kennedy Martin (screenwriter for The Italian Job), satirical playwright John McGrath, dramatist Dennis Potter, and English performance poet Roger McGough.[16]
Her husband Goodwin, who would later co-found the radical journal Black Dwarf, is said to have encouraged Boty to include political content in her paintings.[12] Her paintings did become more overtly critical over time. Countdown to Violence depicts a number of harrowing current events, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and the Birmingham race riots. Cuba Si (1963) references the Cuban revolution. The collaged painting It's a Man's World I (1964) juxtaposes images of The Beatles, Albert Einstein, Lenin, Muhammed Ali, Marcel Proust, and other men, suggesting that despite male domination in Western society, the notion of masculinity itself might be fracturing. Boty continued her analysis of male privilege with It's a Man's World II (1965–66) in which she redisplays female nudes from fine art and soft-core pornographic sources, calling attention to men's easy access to sexualized female bodies.
In June 1965, Boty became unexpectedly pregnant. During a prenatal exam, a tumor was discovered and she was diagnosed with cancer (malignant Thymoma). She refused to have an abortion in order to receive chemotherapy treatment that would have harmed the fetus.[17] Instead Boty smoked marijuana to ease the pain of her terminal condition during her pregnancy. She continued to entertain her friends and even sketched The Rolling Stones during her illness.[13] Her daughter, Boty Goodwin, was born in February 1966. Her last known painting, BUM, was commissioned by Kenneth Tynan for Oh, Calcutta! and was completed in 1966.[18] Boty died at the Royal Marsden Hospital on 1 July that year.[19] She was 28 years old, not much younger than when her daughter, Boty Goodwin, died of a heroin overdose in 1995 while living in Los Angeles.[19]
After her death, Pauline Boty's paintings were stashed away in a barn on her brother's farm, and she was largely forgotten over the next thirty years.[20] Her work was rediscovered in the 1990s, renewing interest in her radical and significant contribution to Pop art gaining her inclusion in several group exhibitions and a major solo retrospective.
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