Pauline Boty at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery

The exhibition Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman is currently on show at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, a component of WAVE, the catchily compressed and conflated collective name for the Museums, Galleries and Archives of Wolverhampton. It’s the first survey of her life’s work to be held in a public gallery since her untimely death in 1966. Hopefully it will herald her emergence from the obscurity in whose shadows she has languished for so long and find her taking her rightful place as one of the major pop artists of the period. I’ve written about her in a couple of previous posts, which partly addressed her erasure from established art histories, and I was genuinely thrilled at the prospect of being able to see her paintings, collages and graphic work at first hand. It was difficult enough to find examples of her work reproduced in books, David Mellor’s The Sixties Art Scene in Britain being the only one I had come across which offered a decent selection. All that’s changed now, since the accompanying (and very reasonably priced) catalogue (available to order directly from the museum) is filled with colour reproductions, including a good many of works not present in the exhibition. It’s a comprehensive survey, and the curator of the WAVE show, Sue Tate, provides illuminating biographical detail, cultural and artistic analysis and context and a convincing feminist reading. Boty is portrayed as a woman ahead of her time, bringing forth ideas which would become part of the language of feminism in the 70s. Had she lived longer than her brief 28 years, she would have undoubtedly played a significant part in the debates of that era and contributed much to the continuing progress towards a more equal and balanced world.

The exhibition was displayed in the triangular room which has been especially designed for the display of pop art, a particular focus of the Wolverhampton gallery. The subtly shifting intensity and tone of the lighting makes the bright, primary colours and patterns of pop painting pulse and glow. A display cabinet in the centre has a luxurious white padded raft of a sofa grafted on, positively encouraging lounging and lending an informal air to the room. The very fact that you can put your feet up and lean against the enclosed exhibits tends to deflate the atmosphere of austere reverence which can permeate the more conventional white box art space.

Boty’s work is hung in a chronological trail along the sides of the triangle, giving it a classic three act structure. It allows us to follow her artistic development and note the recurrence of certain motifs, techniques and concerns which are present from an early stage and are subsequently transformed and adapted to take their place in her mature work. An early self-portrait from 1955, when she was a student at the Wimbledon School of Art, is painted in low key blues, greys and dull yellows. It shows her looking sober and collected, a portrait of the artist filled with serious intent and purpose. The blue-grey eyes stare out with an intense but inward gaze, and there is a sense of concentrated self-reflection, of someone consciously seeking to define themselves and define their true nature. The painting stands in contrasts to the later photographic portraits from the 60s taken by Lewis Morley and Michael Ward in which she deliberately plays games with her image and with the representations of women in art, popular culture and the modern media in general.

Other early pictures find her absorbing a variety of influences, some picked up on trips to Paris. A nude in a bath from 1957, viewed from a hovering, downward-looking perspective, is reminiscent of one of Pierre Bonnard’s many pictures of his wife in the bath, although the cold blues and purples make it a particularly shivery English variant. A solidly sculptural Girl on the Beach from 1958/9, her first year at the Royal College of Art, with blue stripy shirt reflecting the colours of sea and sky, is her version of a 1920s Picasso figure, with a hint of Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach in the backdrop. The rather introverted look on the girl’s face and her protective self-hugging posture might reflect a lingering sensitivity on Boty’s part to childhood taunts of ‘Porky Pauline’ aimed at her by her brothers and schoolmates. A Still Life with Paintbrushes from 1959/61 tilts the plane and flattens the perspective in the manner of Cezanne, Braque and, in an English translation of continental styles, Ben Nicholson. A slightly later painting from the RCA years shows the influence of Sonia Delaunay with its brightly contrasting arcs and circles of segmented colour. It demonstrates an ease with abstraction and the use of bold colour contrasts which would be incorporated into the expressive panels and frames within later work, and further developed in paintings such as the 1961 Gershwin (present here via a small photo). The title of the latter suggests that these abstract shapes, lines and curves on a deep blue background are a synaesthetic representation of musical sound.

Pauline's Monitor nightmare

There are examples of Boty’s early works in stained glass on display too. She took a stained glass course at Wimbledon and enrolled in the school of stained glass at the RCA in 1958. This wasn’t necessarily the staidly conservative option it might at first appear. The Wimbledon course in particular was very progressive, adopting a highly modern perspective on this old tradition which was more forthright than the attitudes holding sway in the painting department. Boty’s stained glass shares the sensibility of her collages, which she had also begun producing at Wimbledon. Indeed, Siren (1960) takes its varied elements from a collage made in the same year – the voluptuous and gauzily draped Victorian woman, the gauntleted hand with tiny performing dog pirouetting on its thumb, the overripe and suggestively pointing bananas and phallic fountain column, and the gaping orifice of the Dantean mouth of hell from the Gardens of Bomanzo in Italy. Collage and stained glass lend themselves to surreal juxtaposition, their discrete objects abutting one another with subconsciously startling inappropriateness. They allow for a play with scale, geography and historical time, and were the ideal media with which Boty could explore her interest in dreams and dream imagery. Dreams were the subject of her RCA dissertation, and her portion of the Pop Goes the Easel BBC Monitor programme, directed by Ken Russell in the early months of 1962, opened with a nightmare sequence drawn from her own dreamlife.

Having previously only seen her collages in black and white in the Monitor film and in a book on collage (Collage: The Making of Modern Art by Brandon Taylor, in which her work is roundly dismissed), I was immediately struck by their colour, with painted backdrops setting off the black and white outlines of the cut-outs from Victorian engravings. A Big Hand (1960/1) has a gold background, whilst the sky in Hand, Secateurs and Children (1960/1) is a rich and deep blue which is predominant in a number of her paintings. Both also feature one of the recurring motifs of Boty’s collages, the giant woman’s hand which extends into the frame like a female version of Kong’s paw thrusting through the bedroom window of the Empire State Building. In A Big Hand, this great mitt lightly balances a monumental grouping of classical male sculptures between its fingers as if they were a fancy cigarette or half-eaten cracker. The hand rises from behind an ornate dome towards which Victorian ladies and gents are flocking, seemingly oblivious to this alarming apparition rising in the sky above them. The dome gives a comparative sense of scale and suggests that a towering goddess of rival proportions to the b-movie 50 Foot Woman is heaving herself up from the ground.

Victorian figures and scenes cut from engraved book illustrations are another feature of the collages, their well-defined monochrome outlines contrasting with the gaudy colours of modern advertising and packaging which are placed alongside them. There is often a connotation of the old world being overlaid and superseded by the new, with the concomitant shift in values which that implies. In other pop art collages, American imagery predominates, but Boty is more sparing in her use of it, drawing her motley subject matter from a more diverse range of sources. In Hand, Secateurs and Children, the two Victorian children who float above the tropical plantation are on the verge of being pruned by a huge pair of secateurs wielded by a giant hand whose nails are painted the glossy, shiny red of well-oxygenated blood. The little girl’s head is about to be snipped clean off, as if it were a dead flower-head. It’s like one of the more gruesome scenes in Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter.

The collages consciously play with traditional feminine imagery and associations. Lace is incorporated as a material in several. It was first used in the 1958 painting Landscape With Lace, edging the border of the frame to suggest a net curtain, turning the wild romantic vista which is the ostensible subject into a view from an imagined room. In the collage with lace and hair colour advert from 1960/1 (a lot of these works lack any official title), two scraps of pink lace are laid upon a background painted in that deep blue again. They blend with cut outs of a woman in a swimsuit and the coloured forelocks and red lips of a hair dye advert. These contrast with the more masculine imagery of clipper ships. The large intruding hand is hirsutely male this time. It sprouts from the dyed hair samples, runs parallel with the extended thigh of the swimsuit woman for a while, and makes contact with both fragments of lace. Perhaps this proximity imbues it with attributes considered more feminine, since it gently holds on to a tiny baby’s hand, which grips its thumb in turn. All of these elements are laid out upon the white, papery circle of a mapped moon, a more ancient and powerful female emblem.

Light My Fire (1960/1) mixes Matisse-like coloured shapes, painted and torn out, with a depiction of gay female desire via two Rossetti women on the cusp of a kiss. They are half-hidden by a book of red-headed matches (as red as Lizzie Siddall’s hair). One of the match stalks is bent, so that the blushing match-heads make a pyrotechnic connection between both women. A wash of watery orange forms a blossoming shadow of flame beneath the women and the matches. Both damp and afire, it’s a suggestive stain, and an indication of Boty’s frank openness about sex.

Showing Peter Blake her Picture Show collage

Picture Show (1960/1), named after the popular movie magazine, was Boty’s version of the pop art parade of heroes. She can be seen explaining to Peter Blake who the various people in it are in the Monitor film. What was black and white there is here revealed to glow with a burnished gold background. Boty differs from other pop artists in the way she mixes figures from pop culture with others from literature, high art and politics (perhaps another reason why she sits uneasily in the pop art canon). Men and women feature equally here, and are yet to be separated out s they would be in the later It’s A Man’s World paintings. Goya’s beautiful portrait of Dona Isabel de Porcel from the National Gallery sits proudly in the centre, a noble focus of attention around which all else is arranged. This is also the first appearance of Marilyn Monroe in Boty’s work. She was at the centre of her pop iconography, and would go on to be the subject of several later paintings, which were in some ways displaced self-portraits. Other women who are presented as objects of Boty’s admiration are the French writer Colette, Madame de Pompadour and a selection of elegantly dressed (or half-dressed) ladies from the turn of the century and the ‘20s, all of them firmly and directly meeting the gaze of the camera. They take their place alongside Franklin D Roosevelt, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud, and a Cypriot freedom fighter. On the bottom left, Beethoven’s quill is dipped into a silver inkwell, symbols of male and female sexuality united to creative effect. In the top right hand corner, a cherub seems to be struggling to push Big Ben over, as if it has been deemed too vulgar and obvious a monument to phallic male power.

The balance of male and female elements is further established in Buffalo (1960/1), in which collaged and painted elements combine. Two dancing, tambourine shaking women in etched black and white skip across a flattened and folded out packet of Buffalo cigarettes. The solitary, solid and firmly rooted bulk of the shaggy, horned and hoofed creature definitely sells this as a manly smoke. There are three panels to the right, beyond the radiating blaze of black and red rays. On top, a clipper ship is anchored, a small and insignificant male presence in comparison with the larger panel below. Large sailing ships are another recurrent image in Boty’s work. Aside from representing male power and its imperial expression, they may also carry more personal associations. Her grandfather was a sea captain and ran a shipping line which had bases in Bombay and Persia. The longer panel stretches to accommodate the Voguishly boyish figures of two fashionably slouched 1920s women. It’s an image from a period which mirrored the 60s in terms of the new freedoms afforded to women from some sections of society. Below them, a red and white chess board provides an intellectual variant on pop art patterning. King and Queen face each other, but the latter has all the moves and is in the dominant position.

My Colouring Book

Boty’s paintings understandably take up the greater part of the exhibition, two sides of the triangle. Having begun with the earlier figurative work, the ventures into the abstract and the collages, which themselves were often combined with painted elements, it becomes clear how all of these were finally brought together within the larger scale of her paintings from the early to mid-sixties. My Colouring Book illustrates the lyrics to the Kander and Ebb song in a series of panels with amorphous borders, giving it something of the feel of a graphically adventurous modern comic. They’re bridged in the middle by the arc of a rainbow, which holds out the promise of a new beginning, the banishment of the song’s heartache.

With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo

Many of the paintings use images taken from magazines or newpapers, a version of the cut-out collage reconfigured, refined and recontextualised in oils. Like other pop artists, Boty loved her movie icons. She looked beyond Hollywood, however, drawing from European new wave and art cinema as well. With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo (1962) and Monica Vitti With Heart (1963) surround monochrome images of the Godard and Antonioni stars with vividly coloured expressions of her feelings for them and what she sees them as representing. Belmondo’s head is posed against a flaming orange backdrop. An efflorescent red flower, Boty’s symbol of female desire and sexuality, covers his hat with fleshily lobed petals. This is the male figure presented as an object of female desire. As such, it is an inversion of the vast majority of pop art objects of desire. The row of red and green hearts at the top of the canvas place him as the King of Hearts with his floral crown. Vitti’s squared-off face is enveloped in a huge red heart rimmed with cerise pink and set against a green background. Looking out at us with a warm and open-hearted gaze, she is an icon of emotional sensitivity, shorn here of the existential, self-searching angst and anomie her characters lose themselves in in the three Antonioni films in which she is the star. Here she’s more like Valentina in La Notte (in which she’s a supporting character), a spirit of spontaneity, generosity and warmth – and fun. She’s all heart.

Boty’s key movie icon, however, was Marilyn Monroe, with whom she identified strongly. Her three Marilyn pictures are brought together here and, hung side by side, form a kind of holy triptych, a celebration of the sensual enjoyment of life. The images of Marilyn are drawn from stills and magazine photos. The Only Blonde in the World (1963) uses a studio still from Some Like It Hot, Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give (1962) a still from her unfinished final film published in Life, and Colour Her Gone (1962), the title again taken from My Colouring Book, a cover shot from Town magazine (a copy of which is included in the exhibition). All three of her Marilyns are contained within narrow filmic strips, framed by broad and brightly coloured panels with kinetic patterns of circles, curves and stripes suggestive of motion, life and vitality. Colour Her Gone was Boty’s immediate response to Marilyn’s death on August 5th 1962. She surrounds her with memorial roses, her symbol of female sensuality, and uses an image in which her eyes are drawn closed in a moment of pleasure rather than in death. The surrounding abstract panels have a sombre grey background, a sober contrast to the red and green of the other two paintings. The smoky tendrils of pink and green which waft across have the feel of the final traces of a vital spirit drifting away. Two of Boty’s Marilyn paintings are now in public collections. Colour Her Gone is in Wolverhampton’s own (purchased with the help of the Art Fund) and a truncated version is used on the cover of Sue Tate's catalogue, whilst the Tate has The Only Blonde in the World (part of which is seen on the cover of Sue Watling and David Mellor's book). In fact, these are currently the only Boty paintings in British public collections, and it was undoubtedly Marilyn’s iconic status which guided the choice. As Sue Tate notes, such images are easily assimilated into the pre-existing pop art landscape. Other paintings, which embody female desire without the presence of such a legendary figure, or which question female objectification and male violence, might prove more troublesome and disruptive to the officially established story of pop as a virile celebration or ironically distanced appropriation of the surface gloss of the consumer society.

54321 (1963) is a direct representation of female desire, with the laughing female figure reminiscent of Cathy Magowan, the presenter of the BBCs pop show introduced by Mannfred Mann’s countdown. The fairground letters counting out the title here promise the kind of fulfilment which so much 60s pop euphemistically concerned itself with. A banner fluttering on the edge of the frame almost spells it out, but the words ‘Oh for a FU’ are cut off at the point at which the censor’s ire was likely to be raised. The painting could be seen partly as a comment on censorship too, then. It was only a few years since the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, which was concerned with just such language, and its use to openly discuss sex. The layered petals of a rose, Boty’s symbol of female sexuality again, blooms outwards from its central bud above Magowan’s tilted head.

Boty’s work became more overtly political as the decade wore on, expanding on the thematic concerns of previous paintings and collages and linking them directly to the turbulent events of the decade. It’s A Man’s World I and II are two paintings which form a diptych, ideally displayed together, although only the second was present here (the first is on display in the current pop art exhibition at Christie’s Mayfair). Taken as a pair, their complementary depiction of the disjointed facets of a divided world becomes clear. They both take the form of the pop art picture wall, here in painted form, and present contrasting representations of masculinity and femininity in the modern world and throughout history. The male figures convey a dynamic blend of artistic, athletic, political and scientific brilliance and achievement. Elvis, John Lennon and Ringo Starr mingle with Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni; Einstein with Lenin, and Marcel Proust with Muhammad Ali. An African chieftain and a classical Greek head suggest that this pattern of male dynamism spans cultures and civilisations. The red bloom of female sexuality is squared off between these various figures. They have their appeal as objects of desire and admiration. A darker note is struck by the landscape at the top, however. A B-52 bomber roars of the White House, and to the right we see a fighter pilot. At the bottom, between the twinned revolutionary heads of Lenin and Einstein, whose ideas changed the world in their own different ways, Boty includes a blurred painting of footage of Kennedy at the moment of his assassination. Jackie Kennedy’s pink-clad form cradles her husband’s dying body. She is the only woman in the picture. The male dynamism, the active principle which the painting partly celebrates, is shown also to contain inherent seeds of violence and destructiveness.

It’s A Man’s World II presents the obverse of the first painting. The female figures arranged in a tiled frame around the central torso are drawn from men’s magazines, and are therefore defined by a male viewpoint. We are still in a man’s world, as the title makes plain. The women gathered here are anonymous objects of male desire, naked and nameless. Their anonymity is represented by the central figure, whose head and lower legs are truncated, leaving only the isolated sexual characteristics for the male gaze to focus on. The arms hang limply and passively at her side, and this air of weary passivity is shared by all the other unknown women who surround her. The cool classical backdrop further underlines this distanced mood, and suggests a state which has existed down the millennia. The two paintings together starkly outline the imbalance between the sexes in terms of power and expectation. By explicitly linking them via their shared titles and similarity in form, Boty makes the connection between the dynamism and power of the first with the anonymous passivity of the second, the one state defining and maintaining the other. It’s this sustained imbalance which leads to the violence which forms the sky and ground of the male picture, and the converse landscape of blank emptiness and dulled torpor in the female.

Count Down to Violence (1964) continues the themes of the Man’s World paintings, as well as developing and adapting earlier imagery. The countdown at the top is no longer in anticipation of ecstasy, but leads instead to a climax of explosive destruction, Thanatos rather than Eros. The red rose of female sexuality recurs, as do the orange flames of desire which surround it. But the rose is being clipped by a red-nailed, secateur-wielding female hand akin to the one which was pruning the Victorian childrens’ heads in the earlier collage. When we follow the blaze of orange flame to its source on the left of the frame we find the husk of a seated human figure. It’s the Buddhist monk who set himself alight as a protest against the war in Vietnam. The flames fan across to frame a black and white newsreel image of a policeman brutally handling a black man in Birmingham, Alabama during the anti-segregation civil rights campaigns of 1963. The two acts are connected by the flames to form a continuum of violence. Its continuity over time is also indicated by the portraits of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy positioned over a flag-draped coffin. The snipping of the rose stem effectively removes any trace of female sensibility from the picture. It’s a man’s world once more, with brutality suppressing sensuality and open expression. The female hand holding the cutting secateurs suggests that women play their part in the creation of this world too, even if it is an indirect role – an eradication of their own desires and outlooks.

Her interest in politics also led Boty to respond to events in Cuba: the 1959 revolution, the attempted counter-revolution at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the 1962 missile crisis. Her 1963 painting Cuba Si once again draws on non-Hollywood cinema for its title, in this case taken from one of Chris Marker’s essay films. It sets collaged elements against a brightly painted and patterned backdrop which takes its initial colour cues from a furled Cuban flag. Circular pop art patterns intersect with folk art weaves. Over the top of these we see a black and white image of gun-waving peasants on horseback, the rider at their head leading them forward with blasts on his trumpet. It looks like a scene from a film, an impression furthered by the fact that it fades out towards the bottom, turning the army into ghost riders. The ghostly hooves of the horses float over an old, torn and much folded parchment map of the island. To the left of this is the small and dapper figure of a 19th century revolutionary whom Sue Tate identifies as Jose Marti, who was also a poet. It’s a highly romantic composite portrayal of revolution, one which remains rooted in a pre-cold war world. This is acknowledged by the figure of the dark-haired, Greco-esque bohemian woman who stands to the right of centre, finger placed on lower lip in a lost in thought pose. This is left-leaning artist’s dream of a revolution Boty seems to imply with a gently mocking air.

Boty’s final completed painting before her death (from cancer) on 1st July 1966 was produced for Kenneth Tynan’s revue O! Calcutta! It’s also the final painting in the exhibition. In Bum, a bottom presents itself to the world from within a plush and purply glowing theatrical proscenium. The word bum is written below in big, eye-catchingly red capitals, emphasised by the blue, green and cream op-art zig-zags and striped outlines in whose dazzling strata it is embedded. It’s an inherently funny word, the mildest of invective with a pleasing roundness in the utterance. It puts forward the idea that sex and sensual pleasure should above all be full of joyful innocence and fun. It’s a fitting note on which to round things off.

There was a variety of ephemera collected in the cabinets which cast a fascinating light on other aspects of Boty’s life and art. Her work for the theatre encompassed roles as actress and designer. Her programme cover for Ann Jellicoe’s play The Knack, later turned into a film by Richard Lester, is particularly striking. Against a background of blue, one of her favoured colours, she places a photographic image of Rita Tushingham (star of stage play and film) coyly hugging a towel around her body. Disembodied hands emerging from neat shirt cuffs, cut out from Victorian engravings, hover around her, forefingers rigidly pointing to various parts of her anatomy. It brings to mind the discomfiting scene from the film in which Tushingham skips through the streets of London uttering the word ‘rape’ to everyone she passes whilst the young men with whom she lodges (and whom she is accusing of a mental if not an actual crime) surreptitiously follow, desperately trying to ‘shush’ her. As a play about a woman in a male environment, it was the perfect opportunity for Boty to follow through her concerns into the production of this striking piece of graphic design.

She was also the subject of a number of magazine ads, articles and photo shoots, men eager to capture her beauty and classic boho looks. She tried to exert a degree of control over these, keeping possession of her own image. So the ads, for artists’ materials, position her as an artist as well as the photographic model (and possible subject for the painters at whom the ads were directed). The photo sessions by Michael Ward and Lewis Morley (the results of which can be found on the National Portrait Gallery site) both took place in her house and studio, and she took an active in role in directing them and coming up with poses. These photos show her amongst her work, and give valuable glimpses of some paintings which are now lost. It also gave her the opportunity to play with images, ideas and preconceptions of women as artists, models and objects of desire. This is done with wit and self-reflective calculation, and adds a further layer to the works in front of which she poses. It’s in this context that the title of the exhibition, which initially seems a little clumsy, begins to make sense: Pauline Boty – Artist and Woman. The two are essentially inseparable in her case, her feminine (and feminist) worldview being such an integral part of her work.

Her appearance in a variety of further newspaper and magazine articles over which she had no control shows the kind of chauvinist assumptions and attitudes against which her work set itself. These reach their nadir with her unwitting appearance in a 1965 issue of Tit Bits magazine. The ‘article’ here used Michael Ward’s photographs, which he had placed with an agency (as Sue Tate explains in the catalogue). All traces of the adjacent paintings which gave her poses their resonant context have been cropped out, and there is no mention of her being an artist. She is reduced to the kind of depersonalised object of male desire which she had made the subject of her It’s A Man’s World II picture. You can see why she identified with Marilyn so strongly, and spoke of the fear which men have of a beautiful woman who also displays a keen intelligence and broad knowledge. Also present is David Bailey’s valedictory book for the decade which had brought him fame - Goodbye and Amen: A Saraband for the 60s. This includes his 1964 photo of Boty, head shown in close-up lying upside down on the bed in the corner of her room. Interestingly, an entirely different version of It’s A Man’s World II is being held up in the background, the head of the central woman in this case present. Bailey includes no accompanying text in his book, as he does for all the other pop artists he includes. Boty isn’t even identified as being an artist. She’s just another of his 60s ‘dolly birds’, shown as a limp, heavily kohled doll. This too was probably a deliberate pose. Boty made her own dolls, and they were included in several photos. Again, Tate points out how these were carefully and consciously used to comment on the way in which women were supposed to present themselves. Whether Bailey was aware of or cared in the slightest about this dimension is questionable.

The lack of accompanying text which would identify her as anything more than a model shows that she was already being erased from the story of 60s art almost before the decade was done. Her early death is often held up as an explanation for this disappearance. But how many others have achieved instant immortality through tragically abrupt departures. No, there’s something else at work here. Even if her work weren’t on display in Wolverhampton, it’s unlikely that she would have been featured in any significant way in the exhibition of British pop artists currently on display at Christie’s Mayfair. It’s a heavily male affair, with the only other female artist being Jann Haworth, the co-creator, with Peter Blake, of the Sergeant Pepper cover. Whereas her Pop Goes the Easel cohorts Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips and Peter Blake all have a significant number of works in the exhibition, she is restricted to just two paintings – Celia With Some of Her Heroes (1963) and the first of the It’s A Man’s World diptych. But at least she’s there, increasingly an accepted part of the story. At last it seems it’s time for her remarkable, coherent and challenging work to emerge into the light once more. Pauline’s back.

Pauline Boty

PART TWO


54321 from 1963 refers both to the TV pop music show and to the Manfred Mann song which was its theme tune, the countdown to the live studio broadcast. The numbers running across the red band at the top of the painting have a gay fairground design, giving them a celebratory feel. Below, a Cathy MacGowan figure (the fashionable presenter of 54321) in dark glasses is painted reclining diagonally across the bottom left, her mouth open in mid-laugh. She looks like she is collapsing with the weight of mirth. Above her, and seemingly partially emanating from the red band at the top, the pulsating heart of a rose hovers like a coalescence of coloured smoke. Boty often uses red flowers as symbols of female sexuality and attraction, and here the woman’s thoughts are made clear by the scrap of a yellow banner on the right hand side of the frame, a free-floating thought bubble whose jumbled and partially obscured pink letters read ‘oh for a fu..’. This represents a frank admission of the undercurrent of desire running close beneath the surface of even the relatively chaste pop of the early 60s. Boty was an enthusiastic participant in the London pop scene herself. She and Derek Boshier successfully passed the auditions for 54321 and appeared as dancers on one of the shows. Boty is definitely the star of the party with which Ken Russell ends his Monitor film, expertly doing the twist with Boshier, later going sole and dancing with unalloyed pleasure, campily glamming it up with an old fur stole and giving the camera a broad, saucy wink.

As 54321 demonstrates, Boty had a frank and open attitude towards female sexuality. In the Dunn book, she talks about it as being a potentially liberating and expressive force. ‘I think it can be as varied as being alive can be varied’, she said. ‘I think it has all the variations of being alive and feelings and things like that’. She differentiates between this natural sexuality, expressive of individual personality, and sex as represented in pornography or sensationalist literature (she cites Harold Robbins’ 60s blockbuster The Carpetbaggers, which combines the allure of instant, disposable wealth and readily available sex). She doesn’t find them offensive so much as completely unrealistic and essentially ridiculous. Such representations are the subject of her 1965 painting It’s a Man’s Man’s World II (the title, taken from the James Brown song, once more reflecting her love of pop music), a collation of images of the naked female body taken from porn mags, with a triangle of pubic hair as its focal point. The central body, around which the others are arranged, has its head and lower legs edited out, a decapitation and dismemberment which erases any hint of personality beyond the sexual charactistics. The arms hang limply at the side, offering no sense of invitation. This is a body presented as a passive object, a locus of anonymous masturbatory lust. Most of the surrounding women are granted faces, although these mainly convey expressions of boredom, weariness and distraction, when they’re not attempting standard ‘sultry’ looks. This pornographic collage is set against a landscape in which a lake leads to an island with a classical temple set within a grove, all beneath skies of azure, summery blue. Perhaps there is an allusion to Diana or Artemis here, the chastely untouchable Goddess of the moon and the hunt. It is also a very calming, meditative scene, its effect counterbalancing the inflammatory intent of the collage it enfolds. The refraction of images intended for the male gaze through the perspective of a female artist well aware of their power gives them a quizzical air, and goes some way towards reclaiming these women’s bodies, restoring the tarnished innocence of their sensual selves. Boty is very direct and uninhibited in her use of sexual language to talk about her own sense of her self and her sexuality in her conversation with Nell Dunn (whose own book of short stories, Up The Junction, published in 1963, was similarly frank in its attitude towards sex). Talking about being hit on in an obvious way by a man, she notes that ‘once they start doing it you think “oh you, you just want a quick fuck” or something’. She also recalls growing up as a girl in a house full of boys and, with startling, self-revealing honesty, says ‘I felt guilty about having an ugly cunt’, detailing her efforts to pull it out of shape to be more like a boy. She uses the words in their literal, descriptive sense in the name of openness and honesty, banishing shame by denying them their shocking power, and reclaiming them from their use as aggressive and abusive profanities. Germaine Greer also attempted to reclaim the ‘c’ word as a possessive and prideful word for women, enabling an informal and guilt-free sense of their own sexuality, in the 60s and 70s. But as she reveals in the 2006 BBC lexicographical programme Balderdash and Piffle, her attempts failed, and she confesses that she’s now rather glad that the word has retained its power to shock. Still, it seems a shame that the innocent usage to which Boty put it, and the guilt-free attitude which that usage embodies, has thus far failed to come to pass, the word continuing to be used as a verbal punch.

Pauline also talks in Dunn’s book about her 1963 marriage to Clive Goodwin, which took place only ten days after they’d first met. She makes anonymous reference to ‘the married man I got involved with’ (clearly Philip Saville) who ‘pursued me so violently, it was a fantastic surprise’. He never made any commitment to the relationship, however, despite his ‘terribly romantic point of view’ and the fact that ‘he talked in such a romantic language all the time’. Of Goodwin, on the other hand, for whom she dumped Saville by letter, she says ‘I just got on terribly well with him’. Friendship and companionability on an equal footing proved more attractive than the old fashioned romantic courtship which had previously impressed her, but whose theatrical gestures could disguise an underlying dishonesty and evasiveness. She further says about Goodwin that ‘he was the very first man I met who really liked women’, adding that this was ‘a terribly rare thing in a man’. Boty andGoodwin’s flat in Cromwell Road was at the heart of a bohemian artistic milieu in the Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill area of London. David Mellor includes a map in his book The 60s Art Scene In London which plots the proximity of various artists and countercultural figures who lived in this part of town. These include Derek Boshier, the abstract artist Robyn Denny, artist, writer and activist Caroline Coon, Peter Blake, journalist and future bestselling writer Shirley Conran, pop artist Joe Tilson, author and literary editor Alexander Trocchi, and the photographer John Cowan, whose studio, just around the corner from Cromwell Road, was used as David Hemmings’ lair in Blow Up. The Royal College of Art was also a short stroll away across Kensington Gardens.

Boty’s version of pop art took into account figures from European culture as much as it did American popular and commercial imagery. She was a big film fan, and two of her paintings pay homage to contemporary stars of European ‘art’ cinema, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Monica Vitti. They go together to form a kind of diptych, male and female aspects of cool European cinematic glamour. Jean-Paul Belmondo, the talkative star of Jean-Luc Godard films such as A Bout de Souffle, Une Femme est Une Femme and Pierrot Le Fou is shown looking back over his shoulder, his gaze veiled by dark glasses, just as Cathy MacGowan’s was in 54321. He is set against a hot orange background, suggestive of sultry French Riviera climates, with a line of pink-outlined red and green hearts scrolling across the top of the frame. An efflorescence of red petals ripples out above his white hat, a symbol of female sexuality which both represents his attractiveness to women and his feminine side (the two perhaps not unrelated). For all his attempts to emulate Bogart and other exemplars of classic Hollywood masculinity, he is far too loquacious to fit in with their terse taciturnity, and his self-conscious imitations merely serve to mark the divide between American and Southern European ideas of film stardom (as far as the new wave directors thought of them, anyway). The face of Monica Vitti, the muse of Michaelangelo Antonioni and star of his films L’Avventura, L’Eclisse and Red Desert, is enclosed within another of Boty’s curvaceous red hearts. She’s nothing but heart, an embodiment of emotional generosity, albeit of an alienated, frequently directionless and existentially vexed variety. It’s a love looking for an object, a meaningful and worthy recipient for its brimful capacity. In the Dunn book, Boty talks about having ‘always sort of worshipped women in a funny sort of way. I’ve always thought they were terribly beautiful’. This sense of beauty, present in the Vitti icon, is also presented in an objectified form in her It’s A Man’s Man’s World II paintingits spirit captured in her best known work (largely due to its having been bought by the Tate) The Only Blonde In The World.


This is generally assumed to be a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, but could in fact be any Marilynesque blonde, full of self-delighting joy. The street in which she is placed is set against a green background, Boty’s favoured green. Boty’s bright, reddish orange forms vivid, kinetic swirls within the field of green, and the bluish grey of the pavement arcs out into an ox-bowed tributary through the green where the blonde’s foot makes a circling turn. This colour is also used, along with yellow, for the truncated diagonal stripes on the right hand side, which gives the illusion that the canvas is furling up in a tubular wave. Combined with the coloured swirls and the ‘leaking’ pavement, this makes the background seem like a crackling, shifting energy field, its source the blonde in the centre, contained within her own cropped band, the edit of the present moment she so fully inhabits. She wrapped in an armour of fur, a soft-edged blur of white paint, and her piled-up, flossy burr of blonde hair is a protective crown, her shimmering dress a shirt of chain-mail. She is in her own tightly-framed, self-contained world, the composition formed around her and taking its cues from her movements. The greens, yellows and oranges are her colours, the forms they take her shapes, the emanations of her spirit.

Boty also produced many collages from pictures cut out of art books or illustrated Victorian story books, sometimes also adding non-pictorial materials to add textural or associative detail – wallpaper or fragments of lace or doilies. Untitled (with Pink Lace and Curls of Hair) from 1960-62, included in Brandon Taylor’s Collage: The Making of Modern Art, sets a ‘swimsuit issue’ magazine cover against circles of delicate pink lace. Perhaps it was this picture which inspired Kim Gordon, herself a visual artist as well as a musician, to write the song Swimsuit Issue, included on the Sonic Youth album Dirty. Three made-up faces form an identikit row, differently coloured curls of artificial hair offering the promise of individualisation. A large hairy hand grasping a baby’s tiny one between its fingers adds an incongruously male element to the overdetermined femininity of the display. Below this composition, a seascape with clipper ships is inserted, rooting these ideals of femininity within a Victorian imperial past. This seascape also recasts the aspects of the feminine above in terms of Odyssean sirens or fairy tale mermaids, the swimsuit issue displaying consciously constructed temptresses of the waves. Pauline shows off more of her collages to Peter Blake in Pop Goes the Easel. They have the playful wit, delight in surreal juxtaposition, and irreverent use of images from art history and sober Victorian engravings found in Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python. Perhaps some influence was at play there. In Pop Goes the Easel, Ken Russell is clearly fascinated by Boty’s collages, his camera gliding over them in lingering close-up, focussing in on their detail.

The Titanic sinks below the horizon of a Constable landscape; A Victorian pin-up and a performing circus dog pose in front of ornamental fountains and the Orcus mouth marking the entrance to the underworld in the Park of the Monsters in Bomarzo, Italy; A boy and girl from a Victorian story book hover above a jungle canopy, a giant hand holding a pair of secateurs moving in to snip the girl’s head off as if it were a faded exotic bloom; Another giant woman’s hand rises behind a dome-capped rotunda of a Turkish cast with minarets to either side, a group of classical statues held casually between its fingers like a neglected cigarette; A glossily nail-varnished hand plucks a rose which emerges from the base of a pine cone, a Victorian mother and child drifting above it as if it were an irregularly shaped, blooming moon, with a cigar-shaped, Jules Verne-esque airship puttering past in the background (‘an occasional spaceship flying through the sky’, as Boty puts it to Blake); A landscape with lace, patterned wallpaper and catalogue flowers is irradiated by a doily sun; a Romantic lake and mountain scene has a lace church superimposed, the head of a Victorian lady placed at the apex of its spire, perhaps reflecting the Victorian notion of female sanctity; A naval seascape with ships anchored in a tropic bay, a military hussar standing proud in the foreground, is given a sky filled with jelly beans (immediately reminding me of Harlan Ellison’s story Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman, in which the trickster protagonist releases a shower of jellybeans onto a timebound city of the future from his flying sled). You can imagine them blazing with a riot of colour, a glorious, psychedelicized sunset of Empire.

There’s a cut-out photograph of a couple kissing, he holding a giant egg (an image with its own built-in surrealism), looking like they are newly married and playing their part in an ancient and now obscure fertility ritual. Behind them, soldiers parade with bayonets extended, a sharply erect masculine symbolism to contrast with the rounded smoothness of the egg. The possibility of trouble and conflict lies ahead, the picture seems to suggest, with the fragile egg liable to end up in fragments of shattered shell trampled by the passing parade – a de-romanticised view of marriage. Another picture has a striped-helmeted American footballer, a gun-toting GI, a serious-faced Cheetah and a starlet on the phone looming over what looks like an Imperial Indian palace. They tower over the building’s imposing facade like larger than life pop cultural icons, the colossal gods of American culture sweeping the British imperial past aside, the American footballer hopping over the walls with contemptuous ease. Above them, flower moon hangs in the sky. Elsewhere, Boty creates a composite art historical landscape linking north and south, with a Renaissance Italian scene leading on to a sheared off fragment of Arnold Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead, with a classical dome added to lighten its sepulchral gothic gloom. A flower bomb is plummeting from the sky, either to destroy the landscape or to carpet it with a hippy carpet of blooming colour. Boty gives Peter Blake a guide to the imagery in several of her collages, which blend high and pop art matter together, dissolving the perceived barriers which usually divided them. She points out the Goya portrait of Dona Isabel de Porcel from the National Gallery, a group of 1930s debutantes, a row of badges with FDR’s face on, Beethoven’s pen, Rudee Valee (Blake recognises him), Brendan Behan captured like a genie in one of his own bottles of booze, Jerry Lewis and the Giant head of Somerset Maugham (which is very much like the head which Gilliam cracks open in the Monty Python titles). The iris of Maugham’s eye contains the face of a woman, the female hidden within the regard of the old artistic guard. It’s an image which brings to mind the face of Jorge Luis Borges shot through the layers of Mick Jagger’s brain on the head of a bullet at the hallucinatory denouement of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s film Performance – an image of mental penetration which Boty replicates here in less violent fashion. Her female image is beamed into the subconscious in a subtle and unobtrusive way, absorbed in the act of vision.

Boty’s early death casts a retrospectively tragic shadow over her life. Whilst it seems to have been lived to the full and was packed with excitement, colour and chaotic incident, there are hints of a more troubled side to the surface happiness of her personality, a penumbral aspect of the bright and vivacious woman seen in the Monitor film and in the photographs. In the conversation with Nell Dunn, she talks about having been ‘going through a terrible period of depression’, adding that ‘when you get very depressed everything goes along somewhere down there, on a sort of horrible level’. This certainly seems like an insight from someone who has known moments of darkness. She also suffered from depression when she was a young girl after her mother contracted TB, leaving her to take on the maternal duties, and resulting in the development of a terrible stammer. This complexity, the mixture of an outgoing sociability with introspection and self-doubt, dispels the image of the ‘dumb blonde’ which was imposed on her by some at the time. This can certainly be seen in the newspaper cutting included in David Mellor’s book The Sixties Art Scene in London, detailing her membership of the Anti-Ugly Action Society, a student body which opposed the widespread destruction of London’s architectural fabric and the rapid development of war-damaged sites in the name of instant, functional (and cheap) transformation which had more to do with real estate profiteering than the desire to create a bright, modernist future (the group were certainly not anti-modernist fogies). The journalist ignores any serious point which the group might have been making behind their playful gestures, instead choosing to remark that ’20-year-old Miss Boty, who is secretary of that very indignant organisation the Anti-Ugly Action Society, is, well, very pretty indeed. As you can see from my picture’. Barry Miles, in London Calling, his countercultural history of the capital, describes an Anti-Ugly demonstration against the new Kensington library building, led by Boty and her fellow Royal College of Art stained glass student Kenneth Baynes, whom she pushed in a bath chair in his fancy dress guise as Christopher Wren. He notes that a television interviewer approached her (and I picture him as one of Eric Idle’s smarmy, Whickerish take-offs from Monty Python) and asked her ‘what’s a pretty girl like you doing at an event like this?’ John Betjeman later turned up, smiled at her and gave the demonstrators his wholehearted blessing. Boty was, of course, well aware of the power of the happy-go-lucky dumb blonde role, and the ways in which it could be used. She comments on it in the Dunn book, showing an awareness of the attraction of such a simplistic, one-dimensional feminity to men. She tells her ‘I’ve been fairly lucky in that I’m pretty attractive to me because I have a – quite a sexual sort of quality but along with a thing that’s kind of like, oh a happy dumb blonde you see’. It’s an image she plays on in some of the photographs she posed for, always with an element of self-conscious parody. This is also evident in the scenes in the Monitor film where she brushes out her hair in the morning and pauses for a moment in front of the mirror with a shock-headed lion’s mane; and in her mimed rendition of Shirley Temple’s The Good Ship Lollypop.

Pauline does Shirley - on the Good Ship Lollypop

The tragic elements of Boty’s life where sadly echoed in the fates of her husband Clive Goodwin and her daughter Boty Goodwin, as Adam Curtis outlines in his typically wide-ranging and compelling article Dream On. Clive died in 1977 after suffering a brain haemorrhage in the lobby of an American hotel and having been thrown out and taken to a cell by police who immediately assumed he was drunk. Clive and Pauline’s daughter Boty Goodwin died in Los Angeles in 1995 of a heroin overdose. She’d been studying art there and, as Curtis reveals, had been plagued with anxieties about her body image, just as her mother had as a child. She’d been brought up after Clive’s death by the poet Adrian Mitchell and his wife Celia Hewitt. Mitchell wrote a moving poem reflecting on her death, Especially When It Snows, which you can hear him reading here (it's the second poem in).

Boty continues to inspire artists of her generation to this day. Derek Boshier’s 2011 painting Pauline’s Gone Digital summons her spirit into the modern era via its all-pervasive technologies, images of her works and moments from her life captured within the frames of mobile phones. Childlike portraits of Derek and Pauline appearing at the edges of the picture, which is laid out like a digital diptych, as if it were a votive offering, an act of remembrance. Marianne Faithfull also included The Only Blonde In The World in the Innocence and Experience exhibition at the Tate Liverpool which she curated, where it kept company with portraits of her, Patti Smith and William Burroughs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray’s Indestructible Object, his metronome bearing the watchful eye of Lee Miller, and paintings by Odilon Redon, William Blake, Richard Dadd and Aubrey Beardsley – an interesting gathering, who would no doubt have found much in common. Pauline’s spirit is captured for all time in its reflective and bright aspects in the spoken rhythms and linguistic idiosynracies of the transcribed Dunn conversation and in the Monitor film. In the latter we can see her doing her mimed routine to Shirley Temple’s On The Good Ship Lollypop in top hat and tails; follow her wandering around the fun fair with her artistic compadres, riding the dodgems and taking pot shots alongside the boys on the rifle range; hear chatting with her soulmate Peter Blake (they seem inseparable in the film) in a relaxed and open manner, her voice refined by without any trace of hauteur; admire her expert twisting with Derek Boshier on the dancefloor, and enjoy her shimmying solo with an old stole and giving the camera a broad wink. Russell’s camera seems to be in love with her throughout, and it is with her that the film ends – sitting quietly, an inward look on her face as she contemplates one of her canvases.

Perhaps a fitting image on which to end would be Pauline’s last painting, made in 1966, a cheeky little picture called Bum. This was created for her friend Kenneth Tynan’s theatrical revue O! Calcutta, a show which included contributions from John Lennon, Edna O’Brien, Sam Shepard and Samuel Beckett (although Beckett’s Breath was not, in the end, used), and which featured on-stage nudity. It would be another four years before it reached the London stage, opening in July 1970 at the Roundhouse. The titular buttocks of Boty’s painting proudly display themselves against a royal blue background within a theatrical proscenium arch glowing with vivid reds and magentas, with curlicued mouldings of lemon yellow and her favoured green. Underneath the stage, the word bum is written with gleeful childishness in loud red, outlined in cheerful coloured stripes and op-art zig-zags. It’s an innocent celebration of the body and its pleasures, and is imbued with a raspberry-blowing vulgarity which has always been at the heart of British popular culture. George Harrison displayed a similarly sophisticated wit when he deliberately mispronounced Pauline’s surname as Botty when he was on a radio programme with her. Bum shows that her work could be both provocative, political, celebratory and just plain fun, often all at the same time. It’s a fine rear with which to sign off, a well-rounded backside presented to the world to say goodbye.


PART ONE is HERE

Pauline Boty

PART ONE

I picked up a postcard at the Oxfam Music and Art shop in Exeter the other week of the artist Pauline Boty, posing in her studio for a photograph by Michael Ward taken on 29th October 1963. It feels full of the optimism and excitement of the times. Pauline sits in deliberate imitation of the famous seated pose which Christine Keeler had struck for the photograper Lewis Morley earlier in the year, a picture which became the emblem of the scandal which led to the fall of Harold MacMillan and ushered in a new, more liberal decade (it took a few years for the ‘sixties’ of official fable to get going). It was also an image which she incorporated into one of her own paintings, Scandal ’63, as you can see in another of Michael Ward’s portraits, shot in 1964. Boty was indeed herself the subject of a series of portraits by Morley in 1963, standing or sitting in various costumes in front of her paintings, shot formally in a studio or caught in a spontaneous, offhand moment at home, and made the centre of a more unusual, artistic composition, peering around the frayed edge of a flat length of fibreglass which looks like a sheet of ice lifted from a pond. In Ward’s photograph, the early morning autumn sun shines through the window, casting her silhouette, with check-hat perching on her untamed tangle of blonde hair, onto the corner of the wall behind her and across the large canvasses, finished and unfinished, which are propped up around her. A half-formed Proust from an early version of her painting It’s A Man’s World 1 peers over her shoulder, and Fidel Castro gazes up at her from the other side from one of her pictures collating images of the Cuban revolution. Torn out photos and small art books (the materials for her collages), and a folder with the edges of pictures tantalisingly peeping out litter the floor alongside spent matches, discarded cigarette packets and butts, the debris of last night’s work or revels. She holds a Cornish Blue mug, presumably filled with hot coffee to pick her up. The hazy, happily blurred look on her face suggests a long night which has carried her through till dawn. It’s a picture which evokes a magical sense of possibility, of a new, confident artistic generation both defining and reflecting the moment and in doing so forming a new and optimistic London bohemia.

I first came across Boty’s work when I picked up a copy of Latest Art magazine in the Brighton Museum and Gallery in 2006. It was a special women’s issue which had an article on her drawing on Adam Smith’s as yet unpublished biography Now You See Her: Pauline Boty, First Lady of British Pop, and featured her paintings It’s A Man’s World II (1963) on the cover, and the hilarious and somehow very British Bum (1966) on the rear (appropriately enough). Happily, you can read this yourself as the magazine has been put online as a pdf over here. More recently I saw her in Ken Russell’s 1963 BBC Monitor film on pop art, Pop Goes the Easel, in which she was one of the four artists chosen to represent the new movement. The others were Derek Boshier, her partner at the time, Peter Blake, who long nurtured an unrequited flame for her, and Peter Phillips. Searching for further information on her, it’s remarkable how completely she has disappeared from the official histories of the period which came to be written some years after the fact, particularly considering her considerable impact at the time. She isn’t mentioned in any of the books on pop art down at my local library (and there are a fair few of these), and the brief passage she merits in Brandon Taylor’s Collage: The Making of Modern Art is a masterpiece of condescension which, in its casual assumption of her subordination to her well-known husband’s influence, belittles her talent and intellect. It further propagates the ‘dumb blonde’ myth that beauty and social vivacity are automatically accompanied by blank vacuity. ‘Pauline Boty…married the left-wing literary agent Clive Goodwin in 1963’, he writes, ‘and immediately produced a series of ‘political’ paintings (note the superiority of those dismissive inverted commas) in which collage-like composition contained easily recognisable symbols of power and pleasure amidst selected icons of commercial modernity’. He then goes on to criticise her abandonment of cut-out collage for ‘fine-art’ painting as being indicative of a retreat into conservatism and comfortable conformity. This attitude, which seems to rob her of any individuality or creative autonomy, suggests one reason why her work fell into such obscurity.

Pauline's Nightmare - Pop Goes the Easel

A quick dry clean - Enticing Alfie

She was certainly an extraordinarily beautiful woman, with an unaffected sense of playfully bohemian, thrown-together style and an air of joyful ebullience which suggested a love of and intense interest in life and the people she encountered in its course. It was natural for photographers, journalists and film-makers to use her as the glamorous ‘face’ of the new pop art generation. This objectification could work against the serious appreciation of her art, however. Those who create media images tend to want to use them to convey their own messages, and impose their own stories upon them. Boty was quite aware of this, and manipulated and self-reflexively commented upon the use of her image in the photographs of Morley and Ward and in Ken Russell’s film, and upon the representation of women in popular media in her paintings. It’s illuminating, however, that the Tate Gallery has only one of her paintings in its collection, The Only Blonde in the World (acquired fairly recently, in 1999), in comparison to 10 by Derek Boshier (mostly bought in the 70s), 31 by Peter Phillips, 35 by Peter Blake, and 113 by David Hockney (who also appears in the Pop Goes the Easel film). But in the National Portrait Gallery, there are 28 portraits of her by Michael Ward, Michael Seymour, John Aston and Lewis Morley, several with the works which are so conspicuously absent from galleries today prominently displayed. Her segment in Ken Russell’s film opens with a nightmare dream sequence in which she is pursued through the curving corridors of the BBC TV centre by a stern-looking woman in black, her eyes turned into skull-like pits by the black lenses of her dark glasses, who propels herself after the fleeing Boty with implacable strength and implacable purpose in a wheelchair. Pauline manages to escape into the lift just before the woman catches up with her, only to turn around and see…. This performance precipitated a secondary career as an actress, both on stage and on television. In fact, she had already starred in an episode of Armchair Theatre in 1962, North City Traffic Straight Ahead, which was directed by Philip Saville, her lover for some time until she married Clive Goodwin, also an actor, director and media person. She auditioned for the lead in Darling, which some believed was based on her affair with Saville, but lost out to Julie Christie, in many ways her alter ego on and off screen. She was the co-star in a 1965 thriller series called Contract to Kill, and had a small role in another of Ken Russell’s Monitor musical portraits, this one of Bartok. She plays the duplicitous prostitute setting up her client for murder in the composer’s savage (both musically and thematically) ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. You can see her small part in Russell's interpretation in a clip included a little way into Adam Curtis' typically wide-ranging and thought-provoking article Dream On, which incorporates the story of Pauline and Clive into its analysis of the co-option and decline of sixties idealism. Her final appearance was an uncredited cameo in Alfie, (9 minutes 15 seconds into this clip) as the manager of a dry cleaners whose notice promising ‘prompt service within’ offers brief moments of uncomplicated pleasure with Michael Caine, who comments that ‘I was getting the suit cleaned in the bargain’. ‘Well, you can’t turn something like that down’, he adds.

Her primary art - Pauline painting

Boty’s acting career was always a secondary concern for her. In Nell Dunn’s 1965 book Talking To Women, a series of transcribed conversations with women from all backgrounds, she is asked which, out of painting and acting, ‘you actually get the most out of doing’. ‘Painting’, she unhesitatingly replies. She then goes on to describe the compensations of acting, its social and collaborative nature, as opposed to the solitary act of creating a work of art. As she puts it (and the directly transcribed nature of the interview really brings her voice to life), ‘painting you do alone, you know, and you sit there and its your own terrible fight or your own lovely bit, whichever sort of phase it’s in but it’s really terribly alone and you make the whole thing yourself’. Creation was evidently an effortful and intensely felt process for her. The acting may have been a release, but she was also encouraged into it by both Philip Saville, with whom she was having an affair in the early 60s, and Clive Goodwin, whom she married in 1963. Saville was a well-known director of stage and screen and Goodwin an influential media figure and sometime actor himself (he played John Ruskin in Ken Russell’s Monitor film on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, again included as a clip in Adam Curtis' article). There is a sense that they felt they could better direct and shape her persona as an actress, recreating her to conform to their own perceived image of what she could be. Being at the centre of the media which she portrayed in her work (TV and film in particular) and gaining experience of the way in which actors self-consciously adapt alternate personae on stage can’t have failed to feed back into her painting, however, giving it a further and more personal reflective layer.

Perhaps the major reason for Boty’s neglect lies in her tragic early death at the age of 28. She discovered that she had lymphatic cancer in 1965 when she went for the scan which confirmed her pregnancy. She refused a course of chemotherapy for fear of harming the baby, trusting instead to less invasive radiotherapy treatments. Her daughter was born in February 1966, but Pauline continued to decline, and died on 1st July 1966. Her husband, Clive Goodwin, and her family were left in a state of shock, and all of her paintings were packed away and stored in a barn on a farm in Kent owned by one of her brothers. There they remained for decades. It’s quite remarkable that nobody took an interest in all those years, that no-one made the effort to seek her work out. It’s not as if she wasn’t a highly visible and charismatic figure on the sixties scene, and the decade, particularly in its colourful pop aspects, has exerted a continuous fascination up until the present day. Finally, the art historian and critic David Mellor brought them back to light, the paintings fortunately none the worse for wear after having lain dormant in rustic storage for so long. He included several in the exhibition The Sixties Art Scene In London which he curated at The Barbican in London in 1993, and she was also prominently featured in the accompanying book in a way which she hadn’t been (and still isn’t) in other surveys of the period. As Mellor puts it in the introduction to the book, the ‘process of re-seeing and revising the recent past also brings forward neglected individuals, and the contexts in which they worked, during the period. (This is particularly so in the case of Pauline Boty.)’ It was this exhibition, and its resurrection of Boty’s work, which led to the Tate buying The Only Blonde in the World. Although why did they not make up for neglect and the passage of lost time by buying the lot?

Pensive window - Looking out at the world

Boty came from a pretty conventional suburban middle-class background, growing up in Carshalton in Surrey. Her father was an accountant, her mother a housewife whose own artistic interests had been quietly but firmly discouraged in her youth as being inappropriate for one of her position and sex. Pauline’s own pursuit of art was hardly encouraged, either by her parents or by the educational system of the time. Responding to Nell Dunn’s question about the extent to which she was bound by the conventions of her upbringing, she talks of her father’s ‘Victorian ideas’, and the fact that ‘he didn’t even want me to work when I left school’, However, when her mother contracted TB, ‘the whole family became chaotic and we really had a fantastic amount of freedom’. Pauline had to take on her mother’s role in the household for a while, and learned to stand on her own two feet at an early age (she was about 12 at the time). Her father still had strictly limited hopes and expectations of her even after she had left home, gone to college and was beginning to establish herself as an artist. ‘I used to get fed up when I went home’, she tells Dunn, ‘and my father would be playing with his grandson or something and if I held it he’d say “That’s what I want to see” and I’d think “you silly old fool”’. She went to the Wimbledon Art School in 1954 on a scholarship and was soon christened the ‘Wimbledon Bardot’. She progressed from there to the Royal College of Art, where she opted to study stained glass, something she’d not shown any particular interest in up until that point. She would have preferred painting, but it was made clear to her that places for women on the college’s painting courses were limited and it was more or less accepted that male students were given preference. It may be that the study of stained glass, compromised choice though it might have been, influenced her in the creation of her collages, and in the bright colours, compartmentalised images and decorative border and background designs of her paintings. In 1961, she was part of what can lay claim to be the first major Pop Art exhibition in Britain, the Blake, Boty, Porter and Reeve show at the AIA Gallery in Lisle Street, off Leicester Square.

Boty’s paintings were imbued with a feeling for pop music to a far greater extent than her fellow pop artists, for whom the musical side of pop initially went little further than the inclusion of Elvis amongst their American icons. Pauline looked closer to home and incorporated the lyrics of the Kander and Ebb song My Colouring Book, the b-side to Dusty Springfield’s top 10 hit I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself (also included on her debut solo LP A Girl Called Dusty) into her 1964 painting of that name. The different objects, moods and glances signifying the end of an affair (Boty’s with Saville?) are coloured in according the scheme of the song’s lyrical instructions: ‘These are the eyes that watched him as he walked away/
Colour them grey’; ‘This is the heart that thought he would always be true/
Colour it blue’; ‘These are the arms that held him and touched him, lost him somehow/
Colour them empty now’; ‘These are the beads I wore until she came between/
Colour them green’; ‘This is the room that I sleep in and walk in and weep in and hide in, that nobody sees/ Colour it lonely, please’; ‘This is the boy, the one I depended upon/ Colour him gone’. It all amounts to an oblique, fragmentary portrait, displaying her collagist tendencies and perhaps showing that her studies of stained glass paid off after all. There’s also something rather cinematic about its focussing in on the telling detail, its combination of close up and middle distance ‘shots’ and its depiction of an empty room, which looks like a set waiting for its actors. The absences referred to in the lyrics are conveyed with a greyish china white which gives a spectral aspect to figures whose features are already starting to fade. Boty’s characteristic mossy, verdigris greens, marmalade oranges and bleeding reds are much in evidence, and the rainbow arcs (another characteristic) which bridge the otherwise disconnected images temper the melancholy resignation of the lyrics and suggest the possibility of a bright new beginning as much as an ending.

PART TWO