‘Bold, outrageous’: forgotten star of swinging 60s pop art finally gets solo show
When Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962, the British artist Pauline Boty did what she always did when something happened in the world that affected her. She turned to her easel to paint it.
The resultant pop art picture captured a happy and carefree Marilyn set against a background of red roses, while on either side grey abstract panels seem to close in around her.
“It’s clever, it’s sad, but it’s full of joy,” says Dr Sue Tate, an art historian who has been researching Boty’s life and work for more than 20 years.
“Pauline loved Marilyn Monroe, and she identified very closely with her – the way the system did her down, the way that when you’re blond and beautiful you can’t also be clever and successful.”
That was Boty’s experience, too. In a 1960s London scene crowded with men (the Royal College of Art where Boty studied didn’t even have a women’s toilet), the young British artist stood out not only for being a “gorgeous, sensual, charismatic woman”, says Tate, but for turning the conventions of the day on their head.
“Her work was so bold, so outrageous, so unusual, and she so shattered gender expectations that people couldn’t cope,” she says.
Art historians now broadly agree that Boty’s work stands alongside the best pop art of the era – and had she not died at the age of only 28, many believe she was on course to become one of the great artists of her generation.
After her death in 1966, Boty’s work was overlooked, forgotten even, for decades. It’s thanks largely to Boty’s sisterin-law, Bridget Boty, a Kent dairy farmer – that the work survived at all – squirrelled away in one of the farm’s barns.
Bringing Boty back to visibility has been “a long slog”, Tate says, but this week a solo exhibition at London’s Gazelli Art House will allow visitors to see some of her most highly regarded work. Paintings and collages filled with faces and images of the day, from Elvis to Marilyn, American gangsters to scandalous British politicians, race riots in America to the missile crisis in Cuba, will go on display.
Boty’s signature style was tied up in the way she portrayed women. “No one at the time celebrated women’s sexual pleasure in the way Boty did,” Tate says. For example, her 1963 painting, – a reference to the TV culture show of the time, Ready Steady Go! – blazes with the banner “Oh for a fu…”.
“The use of the F word at the time will have been deeply shocking, but for her it was funny and tongue-in-cheek,”