Can you help find this Christine Keeler portrait?
The long-lost work by Pauline Boty – aka ‘the Wimbledon Bardot’ – could be gathering dust in someone’s attic.
WBoty was the leading female figure in the pop art movement
hen the artist Pauline Boty died, aged 28, in 1966, she left behind a small but vibrant body of work. After decades of posthumous neglect – most of her paintings languished for years in an outhouse on her brother’s farm – her reputation is growing; but there’s every sign that she’s becoming less famous for the work now belatedly on public display than for a painting nobody has seen hide nor hair of for more than five decades.
In some ways, an archetypal pop art collage painting, Boty’s Scandal ’63 foregrounds a reproduction of Lewis Morley’s photograph of a naked, chair-straddling Christine Keeler – the defining image of the sexually liberated 1960s.
The rekindling of interest in Scandal ’63 comes in the wake of a series of reassessments of Keeler, the showgirl who became an instant celebrity when it was revealed that she had been sleeping with both the War Secretary John Profumo and the Soviet diplomat and spy Yevgeny Ivanov.
Since her death in 2017, she has been placed centre-stage in BBC drama The Trial of Christine Keeler,
and in an art exhibition, Dear Christine, which aimed to “reclaim and reframe” her. This reframing has coincided with renewed appreciation of Boty as the leading female figure in the pop art movement: she was the subject of a major exhibition in 2013 and the central figure in Ali Smith’s 2016 novel Autumn. The time seems ripe, then, to track down Scandal ’63.
Making this his mission is Tom Glover, an artist who in his spare time unearths lost works. He is particularly interested in drawing attention to Boty’s role as a pop art pioneer who offered “an unashamedly female perspective in a male movement that reflected a male world”.
Boty, born in 1938, enrolled at Wimbledon School of Art, where her dazzling looks earned her the nickname “the Wimbledon Bardot”, and then the Royal College of Art. She embraced Swinging London, appeared on Ken Russell’s influential documentary Pop Goes the Easel, danced on Ready Steady Go! and acted opposite Michael Caine in Alfie.
Like her fellow pop artists, she reproduced photographs of celebrities in her paintings, but they boasted a joyful, earthy sensuality at odds with the cool detachment of Warhol and others.
In a subversion of the standard artistic male gaze, her pictures of Elvis Presley, Johnny Hallyday and Jeanpaul Belmondo are vigorously sexual, while her female subjects carry a three-dimensionality and sense of autonomy rarely present in artwork by men: witness the confidently striding Marilyn Monroe in her 1963 painting The Only Blonde in the World (now in Tate St Ives).
Scandal ’63 continued Boty’s interrogation of the way in which female celebrities are presented by the media, while also anticipating the serious engagement with politics (references to the Vietnam War etc) that characterised her later work.
Happily, we can see what the Keeler painting looks like, as Boty was photographed alongside it by Michael Ward in 1964. Keeler dominates the picture, with Profumo and other male figures reduced to cameo headshots.
Where Morley’s original photo represents the oppression and exploitation of Keeler, Boty’s painting reclaims her as an icon of female sexuality, and somebody of far more interest than the men who crossed her path. “It was unheard of then that you would place Christine as the principal actor and victim in the affair,” says Glover.
Sadly, however, a series of tragedies led to a fading of interest in Boty’s work. In 1965 she became pregnant, but a prenatal exam revealed she had cancer; she refused to undergo chemotherapy because of the risk of harm to the baby, and died in July 1966, less than five months after the birth of her daughter Katy.
Her husband, Clive Goodwin, was so scarred by her death that he seems to have barely been able to look at her paintings for several years; Katy Goodwin, who changed her first name to Boty in adulthood, found it emotionally draining to talk publicly about her mother or her work. Clive died of a brain haemorrhage in 1978; Katy of a heroin overdose in 1995.
Boty’s friends and fellow artists proved no more effective as keepers of her flame: their memories of her as a beautiful, enlivening presence (Peter Blake declared that her only fault “was that she didn’t love me back”) eclipsed their interest in her work.
Heroic detective work by the art historian David Alan Mellor led to most of her paintings being unearthed in the 1990s, but too late for Scandal ’63: the trail was ice cold.
Over to Tom Glover. He notes that when Boty was interviewed for Nell Dunn’s 1965 book Talking to Women, she mentioned that Scandal ’63 had been a commission. “So that means it’s unlikely to have been burned or thrown away or lost on its way to an exhibition. Someone ordered it and took it away and probably kept it for as long as they lived – I expect they’re dead now, as they would probably have been in their thirties or forties at least to have enough money to commission art. It’s maybe gone to someone in their family who doesn’t recognise what it is.”
Glover has now discovered correspondence from an academic (his sources ask that this man not be named) who, in the late 1960s, saw a copy of a letter that Boty wrote to the man who commissioned Scandal ’63. This letter was in the possession of the gallerist Mateusz Grabowski, who often worked with Boty and probably brokered the deal. Grabowski asked that the first name and address be kept secret as the buyer did not want publicity, but in a letter to a colleague the academic did reveal the mysterious patron’s surname: Wright.
Since then Glover has been busy contacting the families of all the Wrights who might conceivably have bought work from the London art scene in the mid-1960s – he has even investigated the possibility that Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame was his man – but to no avail.
Having drawn a blank, Glover is now asking Telegraph readers if they can remember knowing anybody called Wright who had an interest in collecting art and was old enough to be around in the 1960s. He has a strong suspicion that the man was not English, based on an interview with the Evening Standard in August 1963 in which Boty complained that so few English people tended to buy pictures.
What would it mean to Glover to find it? “It would mean a lot, because it’s not like finding a missing Picasso – he painted thousands of pictures. There are only 20 or so of hers that we know of.”
If any readers do stumble across
Scandal ’63 in their attic, they may be interested to know that Boty’s painting Bum (commissioned by Kenneth Tynan for his nude revue
Oh, Calcutta!) sold at Christie’s for more than £600,000 in 2017. But whatever its monetary value, it would be wonderful to see this mystery solved – and let’s hope Glover’s quest also reignites interest in one of Britain’s finest, and most underrated, artists.