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.