LOST TREASURE
Ali Smith on the pop-art pioneer Pauline Boty
What’s the worth of a work of art? How do we gauge the worth of a stunningly good painting?
There’s the worth the market puts on it, of course. Then there’s the real worth, what it does in the world, what happens every time somebody simply sees it, since our commerce with art, or our engagement with it, is one of our ways of being most alive, most immediately in touch with our own refreshed senses, one of our ways of recognising the creativity in lifeforce and of remembering, or understanding all over again, what it is to be here right now.
Last November I went to watch an art auction for the first time, the Modern British and Irish Art auction at Christie’s in London. When we arrived I went to hand my coat in at the cloakroom and by the time I got back my partner Sarah had registered a paddle – in my name, not hers. I laughed out loud. I said, we’ ll have to sell the house
if we buy anything up for sale at this auction. Then I spent the rest of the auction with my elbow firmly down on the paddle in her lap so that neither of us, out of some helpless reflex, would raise it.
This is because I knew that some instinctual part of me might actually do it, exchange the house, lock, stock, everything we own, for what was coming up in this sale – the final complete work painted by the artist Pauline Boty.
Boty was pretty much the UK’s only female pop artist. She died young and tragically in 1966. She’d been to the doctor to check on her pregnancy and the examination spotted a malign tumour. Radiotherapy would kill the child so she refused to have treatment, gave birth to her daughter, and died a couple of months later aged 28.
This was the last that she painted, a work commissioned by Kenneth Tynan for his rompy theatrical revue Oh! Calcutta! It’s a painting of a theatre stage, its whole proscenium arch filled to overflowing with a giant gorgeous peachy female bottom, a work of riotous exactitude, a painting that’s decorous, celebratory and richly insolent all at once. Its title? (By which I mean the title of a painting by a woman who knew she was dying far too young?)
BUM.
But that’s Boty’s spirit exactly. All her work – I mean what little of it there is after a life far too short – gives off energy full not just of pure electric sensory vitality but also social critique, wit, warmth of intelligence. And that’s just in reproduction. BUM was coming up that night for sale for the first time. We’d gone especially to be able to see it in the flesh, as it were. Up to now it’s not been exactly easy for members of the public to see much work by Boty.
This is because a lot of what she’d done simply went missing or was lost after her death. This is only one of the tragedies of her loss,
As the work of Pauline Boty gains long-overdue recognition, the novelist Ali Smith pays tribute to the British pop artist, who died tragically young
since this pioneering artist was also, in person, a vibrant challenger of preconceptions about politics, class and especially gender; a (very rare) voice on the airwaves talking about all these things; a founder member of the Anti-Uglies (a group who spoke out about the uglinesses of post-war architecture); a dancer on Ready Steady Go! ; and a TV, film and stage actress in the Julie Christie mould – in fact, at the time it could’ve been said that Julie Christie was in the Pauline Boty mould. That’s how shining she was. That’s how very here.
That her work was lost for decades – that we have any of it at all – and that so much of what we do have was unearthed (literally dug out, covered in cobwebs, of an old shed on her brother’s farm) in the early 1990s, we owe to two loving and discerning art historians, David Alan Mellor and Sue Tate, who’ve curated and written about her. I knew nothing about Boty myself till about three years ago, when I stumbled on a reproduction in an art magazine of a painting of Marilyn Monroe.
The painting took a recognisable image, a typical photo-image of Monroe, but placed it on a wallpaper of roses, which then grow out of their paper selves and round her as if embracing her. As if holding this in place a double strip of abstract pink/green swirls in grey super-impose themselves on the wallpaper world, somehow abstracting Marilyn from all figurativeness. The picture was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was titled Colour Her Gone. I’m a fan of the Kander and Ebb song ‘My Coloring Book’, so I noticed that the artist had shifted the gender in the line quoted from the song: colour him gone.
It was by an artist I’d never heard of. A female pop artist? Pauline who? I looked up all the images I could find of this artist’s work. There weren’t many. Why did they all stop at 1966? Ah.
Then I found that it was possible to see her art, too, in the backgrounds of pictures that photographers of the time had taken of her (she was stunningly beautiful); she was one of the earliest of the 1960s feminist artists to utilise her own image as part of her art.
At the time I was writing a book whose title was Autumn, and whose subject was the briefness of life and the ways in which, regardless of this, we come to ripeness. I’d been thinking Keatsian thoughts. Like Keats, a bright star who’d died tragically young, but not before he changed the face and the possibilities of the lyric poem in the English tradition, she’d lived so short a life – and the more I’d found out about her, the more I knew she was a pure source when it comes to the powers of art.
It’s beginning to get easier for us to see Boty’s works, I mean publicly. The Tate owns one magnificent painting, another Marilyn abstraction/figuration, called The Only Blonde in the World (1963). It’s a reworking of a familiar frame from the film Some Like It Hot and when you see it in the flesh, the play of its layers asks you to reconsider every reproduced picture of anything you’ve ever seen. When you close your eyes after seeing it, its play of reds and greens leaves your eyes full of white light, as if washed clean. Right now it’s on show at Tate St Ives. And at the end of last year the National Portrait Gallery – which till then had owned nearly thirty pictures of the beautiful Boty as a ‘sitter’, but none of her work – bought their first actual artwork, a self-portrait in stained glass from 1958. Done when she wasn’t yet 20, it’s a witty appropriating of art history’s medieval, renaissance, Pre-Raphaelite, even Picasso-like associations, to reveal presence, light, lifeforce in the shape of a girl. It’s the only artwork like it in the whole gallery.
That night in November at Christie’s, I was hoping a public body would buy BUM. Well, life is full of dashed hopes. Still, a very buoyant thing happened that night. Boty’s worth, market-wise, is being realised after all the years and the painting went for twice its estimate – at a top end price for pop art pieces – to some bloody lucky anonymous private collector. What was thrilling to witness, in ultra-cool Christie’s, was that while all sorts of other works went for millions, hundreds of thousands more, there was a real frisson of delight and excitement running round the room at the bidding for BUM. (I loved writing that sentence.)
Now another of her works has come up for sale and will go under the hammer on 19 June. Portrait of Derek Marlowe with Unknown Ladies, a 1962–3 painting, was so beloved of its owner, the novelist, stage and screen writer Derek Marlowe, that he took it round the world with him when he moved from country to country. I’m not surprised. In reproduction, it’s a wry and cheeky work, with Marlowe pictured in cool blues, purples, greys and blacks against a purple-blue drape, his hand to his chin, his face happily pensive and his cigarette, gestural in his hand, pointing upwards at a bright red balcony bannering the top of the picture and filled with the heads of louche, red-lipped and pouting women.
Christie’s kindly let me view the painting last week, since I’m writing this piece. In the flesh, the painting is dazzling, loose and free at the same time as tight and held, packed with contrasting energies. But what radiates off its coolness is – warmth. Warmth, life, affection, a human work of art. It teases Marlowe with real fondness. Just seeing it filled me with love.
I hope a public gallery buys it so we can all see it. I know I’m being naive. In any case, I can’t wait to see what happens when this one comes to market. Boty is back, and we need her more than ever, her eye on where we’ve come from, what we’re doing with our images, how we’ve lived and live.
I’ll have to be careful with my house.
Still, it’d be worth it.
Pauline Boty’s portrait of Derek Marlowe will be auctioned at the Christie’s Modern British & Irish Art Evening Sale (8 King Street, London SW1; www.christies.com) at 5.30pm on 19 June.