By Olivia Hurton
Painting desire in all the electric colours of fairground rides and magazine covers, Pauline Boty was the heroine at the centre of British Pop Art, an artistic movement dominated by men. It exploded onto the London art scene in the mid-1950s with the exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where the works showcased employed eye-catching text and bold imagery to celebrate youthful exuberance, commercial culture and sexual liberation. Yet characterised by a ‘cool’ and ‘detached’ style, which frequently made use of sexualised and objectifying images of women, this was not seen as the natural preserve of the female artist, whose work was, by contrast, thought to be inherently ‘emotional’ and ‘intimate’. How, then, could an empowering female version of Pop be envisioned, given such art was dismissive of female subjectivity and trivialised the domestic goods that women routinely consumed?
Pauline Boty was the answer to this question. An irrepressible dancer at The Establishment; a daring dresser in Mary Quant’s Kings Road creations, with men’s denim jackets and jeans (Peter Blake once teasingly pointed out that her fliers were open). Her eyes were streaked with black kohl – ‘I always feel that without my eyes I don’t exist’ she remarked to Vogue columnist Nell Dunn – and her hair backcombed into ethereal disarray. She channelled the messy elegance of the suburbs. She embraced contradiction.
Brought up playing savage games of cowboys and Indians with her brothers, they would gleefully tie her up until she screamed. And Boty kept on screaming; she despised the idea of being a shy, retiring female. She had grown up listening to her mother recounting her thwarted career as an artist as if it were a myth: The Slade School of Art accepted her but her father thought such creative aspirations unfitting for a female. ‘All over the country young girls are sprouting, shouting and shaking, and if they terrify you, they mean to and they are beginning to impress the world,’ she later announced on the BBC’s radio programme, Public Ear, which she co-hosted. For Boty, a woman’s voice and body need not be simply vehicles for the world’s objectification; they were a powerful means of attaining sexual pleasure, commanding attention, and an important way of externalising the self. This translated into her approach to Pop Art.
Boty’s earliest works were collages. Whilst photographic sources had always aided her in drawing, they began to significantly shape her work when she took up stained glass at Wimbledon College of Art. Under Charles Carey, the stained-glass department was a dynamic creative space; his students eschewed traditional religious iconography for designs befitting swimming pools and nightclubs. Boty worked by assembling collages before transferring these to glass, a technique that was highly effective given the medium’s stark edges and outlines, as is evinced in an untitled work from c.1960, featuring an Edwardian woman floating in a Chagall-style reverie.
Unlike Max Ernst’s collages, which are often cited as inspirations for Boty’s work due to their surrealistic transfigurations and indebtedness to Victoriana, Boty’s collages communicate in highly personal and feminine aesthetic language. They come to us like the treasures of a teenage bedroom, replete with glossy pin-ups, used cigarette wrappers and discarded pink lace. They are an interrogation of our relationship with consumer culture – what it tells us about our world and how it shapes the self. A collage from c.1959 of a woman’s hand wielding a Pears soap bar is a striking exemplar of this. It hovers daintily amid a whirl of metallic wrapping papers, an antique desk clock, roses and an all-male orchestra. With dream-like logic, the work expresses a desire to sanitize time, to still its destructive effects, particularly on love and beauty, as is suggested by the nearby emblem of the roses, a Boty leitmotif of exploding female desire and sensuality. The black-tied male orchestra posing for the camera, basking in the glory of their art, sharply contrasts with the anonymous disembodied female hand cleaning with the bar of soap. That this belongs to a wife is suggested by the ring on her finger, here a symbol of domestic duty and obligation. It seems to encapsulate Boty’s conviction that seductive advertising campaigns leave women feeling ‘uneasy and frustrated’ by creating an allure around domestic existence that tricks them into ‘think[ing] of marriage as the only aim in life’ and thus becoming ‘slaves to domesticity’. Like Derek Boshier’s ‘The Identi-Kit Man’ (1962), it serves as a warning against the insidious socialising powers of consumerist culture.
Untitled (Pears Inventor), c. 1959, collage and mixed media on paper, 27.5 x 18cm
Boty’s greatest challenge to Pop Art, as practised by male artists like Andy Warhol who was busy proliferating sexy technicolour Marilyns, was her inversion of the male gaze. She painted large, shrine-like canvases of the men who filled her fantasies, like French New Wave star Jean Paul Belmondo and writer Derek Marlowe. Copying from publicity stills and iconic cover pages, Boty’s subjects were frequently painted in monochrome, an acknowledgement of their photographic origins, against vibrant block colour backgrounds. With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo (1962)—a title that signs off the work as if it were fan mail— repurposes Boty’s source material to frame the star as a product of her imagination. By painting him in one of her hats in the portrait, Boty immediately assimilates him into her private world, whilst the vaginal flower, redolent of Georgia O’Keeffe, expresses a consuming desire, one that almost eclipses the subject. The sentiment is echoed in a letter to Jane Percival: ‘Indescribable joy and lechery and slurp, slurp he’s [Belmondo] lovely, just lovely.’ Even Boty’s private sexual fantasies are permeated with consumerist discourses—slaking her desire for Belmondo offers all the gratification of a refreshing Pepsi Cola.
Whilst Sue Tate has suggested the work is not about ‘Belmondo per se but the emotions he generates among his female fans’, Boty’s point seems to be that it isn’t possible to fully translate him into paint. After all, Belmondo’s dark shades and white-rimmed hat conceal most of his face, reflecting his elusiveness as a ‘20th century god’—Boty’s epithet for celebrities—mediated by screens, papers and art, not fully accessible to the desiring viewer. Similarly, his flirtatious over-the-shoulder glance, with lips full and open, create a tantalising sense that at any moment he could turn around and disappear. Boty captures this special, but flickering moment of a fan’s imagined intimacy, whilst acknowledging that Belmondo’s subjectivity is not something that can be pasted into a fan book or captured on a canvas.
With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo, 1962, oil on canvas, 122 x 152cm
If Boty’s work revels in the joy of sexuality and desire, it is also alert to its potentially tragic implications. Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood actress, allowed Boty to explore this contradiction and the artist returned to her image repeatedly in her work. In ‘Colour Her Gone’, painted as a response to the actress’s death in 1962, Boty copied a close-up shot of Marilyn as a cover-star on Time magazine. She is depicted by Boty as vividly coloured with warm flesh and a strikingly defiant smile. Around her are lush roses spreading out extravagantly in a manner akin to Dante Rossetti’s seductive muse portraits. The star is humanised by a loose t-shirt (Boty’s addition), collapsing, if for a second, the chasm between fan and cultural icon, and veiling Marilyn’s scene-stealing body in a bid to avoid overt sexualisation. Two grey panels, with the suggestion of tombstones, frame the face as if ready to close over it, yet the abstract shapes on them, reminiscent of squiggly Celia Birtwell prints, suggest an exuberance that will not be contained. This is how Boty wanted the actress to be remembered – beautiful, human and defiantly happy, a figure of empathy not objectification. Boty would emphasize the cultural importance of celebrities as a site upon which we can pin ‘our fears, hopes, frustrations and dreams’. When people do so, she explained, ‘we’re no longer alone’.
Colour Her Gone, 1962, oil on hardboard, 121.9 c 121.9cm
In 1966 Boty died from cancer at just twenty-eight; she was diagnosed whilst pregnant and firmly refused chemotherapy to protect the life of her unborn child. Her final days at her Notting Hill flat were filled with spontaneous bedside parties and sessions of sketching the Rolling Stones. All had been passion, creativity and self-discovery. This was the woman that had spray-painted her shoes gold on dancefloors; had stunned Hockney, Blake and Boshier at the RCA; had taught women, through her art, to embrace every passing pleasure. Unsurprisingly then, Pop Art was, to her, a ‘nostalgia for NOW’, an expression of an intensely lived moment, the kind found in pop songs, Hollywood movies and magazines. Her work speaks with an undying love for an era and for life.
Pauline Boty: A Portrait is at Gazelli Art House, London, 1 December 2023 to 24 February 2024.
References
Nell Dunn, Talking to Women (1965)
Marc Kristal, Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister (2023)
Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History (2000)
Kalliopi Minioudaki, ‘Pop’s Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler’, Oxford Art Journal (2007), 30:3, pp. 402-430.
Sue Tate, Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman (2013)
Bluestocking Oxford 