Pauline Boty
Encyclopedia
Pauline Boty was a founder of the British
Pop art
movement and Britain's only notable female Pop art
painter. Boty's paintings and collages often demonstrated a joy in self-assured femininity and female sexuality, and expressed overt or implicit criticism of the "man's world" in which she lived. Her rebellious art, combined with her free-spirited lifestyle, has made Boty a herald of 1970s feminism
.
family. The youngest of four children, she had three older brothers and a stern father who made her keenly aware of her position as a girl. In 1954 she won a scholarship to the Wimbledon School of Art where she went despite her father's disapproval (Boty's mother, on the other hand, was a frustrated artist, having been denied parental permission to attend the Slade School of Fine Art
herself). Boty earned an Intermediate diploma in lithography
(1956) and a National Diploma in Design in stained glass
(1958). Her schoolmates called her "The Wimbledon Bardot" on account of her resemblance to the French
film star Brigette Bardot. Encouraged by her tutor Charles Carey to explore collage
techniques, Boty's painting became more experimental. Her work showed an interest in popular culture
early on. In 1957 one of her pieces was shown at the Young Contemporaries exhibition alongside work by Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Bridget Riley
.
She studied at the School of Stained Glass at the Royal College of Art
(1958–61). She had wanted to attend the School of Painting, but was dissuaded from applying as admission rates for women were much lower in that department. Despite the institutionalized sexism at her college, Boty was one of the stronger students in her class, and in 1960 one of her stained glass works was included in the traveling exhibition Modern Stained Glass organized by the Arts Council. Boty continued to paint on her own in her student flat in west London
and in 1959 she had three more works selected for the Young Contemporaries exhibition. During this time she also became friends with other emerging Pop art
ists, such as David Hockney
, Derek Boshier
, Peter Phillips
and Peter Blake
.
While at the Royal College of Art
, Boty engaged in a number of extracurricular activities. She sang, danced, and acted in somewhat risqué college reviews, published her poetry in an alternative student magazine, and was a knowledgeable presence at the film society where she developed her interest especially in European new wave
cinema. She was also an active participant of the Anti-Ugly Action campaign, a group of RCA stained glass, and later architecture, students who protested against new British architecture that they considered offensive and of poor quality.
The two years after graduation were perhaps Boty's most productive. She developed a signature Pop
style and iconography. Her first group show, "Blake
, Boty, Porter, Reeve" was held in November 1961 at A.I.A. gallery in London
and was hailed as one of the first British Pop art
shows. She exhibited twenty collages, including Is it a bird, is it a plane? and a rose is a rose is a rose, which demonstrated her interest in drawing from both high and low popular culture
sources in her art (the first title references the Superman
comic, the second quotes American ex-patriate poet Gertrude Stein
).
The following spring Boty, along with Blake
, Boshier
, and Phillips
, were featured in Ken Russell
's BBC
film Pop Goes the Easel, which first aired on March 22, 1962. Although the documentary placed Boty at the center of the nascent British Pop art
movement, unlike her male peers she did not get an opportunity to speak directly and intelligently about her work during the film.
Boty's appearance on Pop Goes the Easel marked the beginning of her brief acting career. She landed roles in two Armchair Theatre
plays for ITV and an episode of the BBC
series Maigret. Boty also appeared on stage at the Royal Court
in Day of the Prince and in Frank Hilton's Afternoon Men at the New Arts Theatre. (Boty, a regular on 'swinging 60s' club scene in London, was also a dancer on Top of the Pops
and Ready Steady Go!
). Although acting was lucrative, it distracted her from painting, which remained her top priority. Yet the men in her life encouraged her to pursue acting, as it was a more conventional career choice for women in the early 1960s. The popular press picked up on her glamorous actress persona, often undermining her legitimacy as an artist by referring to her physical charms. For example, Scene ran a front page article in November 1962 that read, "Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have large beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blonde and you have PAULINE BOTY."
Her unique position as Britain's only female Pop art
ist gave Boty the chance to redress sexism in her life as well as her art. Her early paintings were sensual and erotic, celebrating female sexuality from a woman's point of view. Her canvases were set against vivid, colorful backgrounds and often included erogenous close-ups of red flowers, symbolic of the female sex. She painted her male idols—Elvis, French
actor Jean-Paul Belmondo
, British
writer Derek Marlowe
—as sex symbols, just as she did actresses Monica Vitti
and Marilyn Monroe
. Like Andy Warhol
, she recycled publicity and press photographs of celebrities in her art. She exhibited in several more group shows before staging her first solo exhibition at Grabowski Gallery in the fall of 1963. The show was a critical success. However, Boty continued to take on additional acting jobs. She was a presenter on the radio program Public Ear in 1963-64, and in the following year she was typecast yet again in the role of 'the seductive Maria' in a BBC serial.
In June 1963, she married literary agent and television producer Clive Goodwin (1932-77) after a mere ten-day romance. Her marriage disappointed many, including Peter Blake
and her married lover, director Philip Saville
, whom she met towards the end of her student days and had worked for. Their affair is said to have inspired the movie Darling
(1966). Boty and Goodwin's Cromwell Road flat became a central hang-out for many artists, musicians, and writers, including Bob Dylan
(whom Boty brought to England) Hockney
, Blake
, Michael White
(producer of The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and later Monty Python and the Holy Grail
), playwright Kenneth Tynan
, Troy Kennedy Martin
(screenwriter for The Italian Job
), satirical playwright John McGrath, dramatist Dennis Potter
, and English performance poet Roger McGough
.
Her husband Goodwin, who would later co-found the radical journal Black Dwarf, is said to have encouraged Boty to include political content in her paintings. Her paintings did become more overtly critical over time. Countdown to Violence depicts a number of harrowing current events, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
, the Vietnam War
, and the Birmingham
race riot
s. Cuba Si (1963) references the Cuban revolution
. The collaged painting It's a Man's World I (1964) juxtaposes images of The Beatles, Albert Einstein
, Lenin, Muhammed Ali, Marcel Proust
, and other men, suggesting that despite male domination in Western society, the notion of masculinity itself might be fracturing. Boty continued her analysis of male privilege with It's a Man's World II (1965–66) in which she redisplays female nudes from fine art and soft-core pornographic sources, calling attention to men's easy access to sexualized female bodies.
In June 1965, Boty became unexpectedly pregnant. During a prenatal exam, a tumor was discovered and she was diagnosed with cancer
(malignant Thymoma
). She refused to have an abortion
in order to receive chemotherapy
treatment that would have harmed the fetus. Instead Boty smoked marijuana to ease the pain of her terminal condition during her pregnancy. She continued to entertain her friends and even sketched The Rolling Stones
during her illness. Her daughter, Boty Goodwin, was born in February 1966. Her last known painting, BUM, was commissioned by Kenneth Tynan
for Oh, Calcutta! and was completed in 1966. Boty died at the Royal Marsden Hospital on 1 July that year. She was 28 years old, not much younger than when her daughter, Boty Goodwin, died of a heroin overdose in 1995 while living in Los Angeles
.
After her death, Pauline Boty's paintings were stashed away in a barn on her brother's farm, and she was largely forgotten over the next thirty years. Her work was rediscovered in the 1990s, renewing interest in her radical and significant contribution to Pop art
gaining her inclusion in several group exhibitions and a major solo retrospective.
TV
Videos
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
movement and Britain's only notable female Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
painter. Boty's paintings and collages often demonstrated a joy in self-assured femininity and female sexuality, and expressed overt or implicit criticism of the "man's world" in which she lived. Her rebellious art, combined with her free-spirited lifestyle, has made Boty a herald of 1970s feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
.
Life and works
Boty was born in suburban south London in 1938 into a middle-class, CatholicCatholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
family. The youngest of four children, she had three older brothers and a stern father who made her keenly aware of her position as a girl. In 1954 she won a scholarship to the Wimbledon School of Art where she went despite her father's disapproval (Boty's mother, on the other hand, was a frustrated artist, having been denied parental permission to attend the Slade School of Fine Art
Slade School of Fine Art
The Slade School of Fine Art is a world-renownedart school in London, United Kingdom, and a department of University College London...
herself). Boty earned an Intermediate diploma in lithography
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
(1956) and a National Diploma in Design in stained glass
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
(1958). Her schoolmates called her "The Wimbledon Bardot" on account of her resemblance to the French
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
film star Brigette Bardot. Encouraged by her tutor Charles Carey to explore collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
techniques, Boty's painting became more experimental. Her work showed an interest in popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
early on. In 1957 one of her pieces was shown at the Young Contemporaries exhibition alongside work by Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley
Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of Op art.-Early life:...
.
She studied at the School of Stained Glass at the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
(1958–61). She had wanted to attend the School of Painting, but was dissuaded from applying as admission rates for women were much lower in that department. Despite the institutionalized sexism at her college, Boty was one of the stronger students in her class, and in 1960 one of her stained glass works was included in the traveling exhibition Modern Stained Glass organized by the Arts Council. Boty continued to paint on her own in her student flat in west London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and in 1959 she had three more works selected for the Young Contemporaries exhibition. During this time she also became friends with other emerging Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
ists, such as David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
, Derek Boshier
Derek Boshier
Derek Boshier is a British pop artist works in various media including painting, drawing, collage, photography, film and sculpture....
, Peter Phillips
Peter Phillips (artist)
You also may be looking for Pete Rock.Peter Phillips is an English artist who is one of the pioneers of the Pop Art movement...
and Peter Blake
Peter Blake (artist)
Sir Peter Thomas Blake, KBE, CBE, RDI, RA is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.-Career:...
.
While at the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
, Boty engaged in a number of extracurricular activities. She sang, danced, and acted in somewhat risqué college reviews, published her poetry in an alternative student magazine, and was a knowledgeable presence at the film society where she developed her interest especially in European new wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
cinema. She was also an active participant of the Anti-Ugly Action campaign, a group of RCA stained glass, and later architecture, students who protested against new British architecture that they considered offensive and of poor quality.
The two years after graduation were perhaps Boty's most productive. She developed a signature Pop
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
style and iconography. Her first group show, "Blake
Peter Blake (artist)
Sir Peter Thomas Blake, KBE, CBE, RDI, RA is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.-Career:...
, Boty, Porter, Reeve" was held in November 1961 at A.I.A. gallery in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and was hailed as one of the first British Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
shows. She exhibited twenty collages, including Is it a bird, is it a plane? and a rose is a rose is a rose, which demonstrated her interest in drawing from both high and low popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
sources in her art (the first title references the Superman
Superman
Superman is a fictional comic book superhero appearing in publications by DC Comics, widely considered to be an American cultural icon. Created by American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian-born American artist Joe Shuster in 1932 while both were living in Cleveland, Ohio, and sold to Detective...
comic, the second quotes American ex-patriate poet Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
).
The following spring Boty, along with Blake
Peter Blake (artist)
Sir Peter Thomas Blake, KBE, CBE, RDI, RA is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.-Career:...
, Boshier
Derek Boshier
Derek Boshier is a British pop artist works in various media including painting, drawing, collage, photography, film and sculpture....
, and Phillips
Peter Phillips (artist)
You also may be looking for Pete Rock.Peter Phillips is an English artist who is one of the pioneers of the Pop Art movement...
, were featured in Ken Russell
Ken Russell
Henry Kenneth Alfred "Ken" Russell was an English film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style. He attracted criticism as being obsessed with sexuality and the church...
's BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
film Pop Goes the Easel, which first aired on March 22, 1962. Although the documentary placed Boty at the center of the nascent British Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
movement, unlike her male peers she did not get an opportunity to speak directly and intelligently about her work during the film.
Boty's appearance on Pop Goes the Easel marked the beginning of her brief acting career. She landed roles in two Armchair Theatre
Armchair Theatre
Armchair Theatre is a British television drama anthology series, which ran on the ITV network from 1956 to 1974. It was originally produced by Associated British Corporation, and later by Thames Television after 1968....
plays for ITV and an episode of the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
series Maigret. Boty also appeared on stage at the Royal Court
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
in Day of the Prince and in Frank Hilton's Afternoon Men at the New Arts Theatre. (Boty, a regular on 'swinging 60s' club scene in London, was also a dancer on Top of the Pops
Top of the Pops
Top of the Pops, also known as TOTP, is a British music chart television programme, made by the BBC and originally broadcast weekly from 1 January 1964 to 30 July 2006. After 25 December 2006 it became a radio program, now hosted by Tony Blackburn...
and Ready Steady Go!
Ready Steady Go!
Ready Steady Go! or simply RSG! was one of the UK's first rock/pop music TV programmes. It was conceived by Elkan Allan, head of Rediffusion TV. Allan was assisted by record producer/talent manager Vicki Wickham, who became the producer. It was broadcast from August 1963 until December 1966...
). Although acting was lucrative, it distracted her from painting, which remained her top priority. Yet the men in her life encouraged her to pursue acting, as it was a more conventional career choice for women in the early 1960s. The popular press picked up on her glamorous actress persona, often undermining her legitimacy as an artist by referring to her physical charms. For example, Scene ran a front page article in November 1962 that read, "Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have large beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blonde and you have PAULINE BOTY."
Her unique position as Britain's only female Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
ist gave Boty the chance to redress sexism in her life as well as her art. Her early paintings were sensual and erotic, celebrating female sexuality from a woman's point of view. Her canvases were set against vivid, colorful backgrounds and often included erogenous close-ups of red flowers, symbolic of the female sex. She painted her male idols—Elvis, French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
actor Jean-Paul Belmondo
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Jean-Paul Belmondo is a French actor initially associated with the New Wave of the 1960s.-Career:Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris, Belmondo did not perform well in school, but developed a passion for boxing and football."Did you box professionally very long?" "Not very long...
, British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
writer Derek Marlowe
Derek Marlowe
Derek William Mario Marlowe was an English playwright, novelist, and screenwriter.- Life :Derek Marlowe was born in Perivale, Middlesex, and lived there and in Greenford as a child. His father was Frederick William Marlowe and his mother Helene Alexandroupolos...
—as sex symbols, just as she did actresses Monica Vitti
Monica Vitti
Monica Vitti is an Italian actress best known for her starring roles in films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, her lover at that time, during the early 1960s...
and Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
. Like Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
, she recycled publicity and press photographs of celebrities in her art. She exhibited in several more group shows before staging her first solo exhibition at Grabowski Gallery in the fall of 1963. The show was a critical success. However, Boty continued to take on additional acting jobs. She was a presenter on the radio program Public Ear in 1963-64, and in the following year she was typecast yet again in the role of 'the seductive Maria' in a BBC serial.
In June 1963, she married literary agent and television producer Clive Goodwin (1932-77) after a mere ten-day romance. Her marriage disappointed many, including Peter Blake
Peter Blake (artist)
Sir Peter Thomas Blake, KBE, CBE, RDI, RA is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.-Career:...
and her married lover, director Philip Saville
Philip Saville
Philip Saville is a British television direction and screenwriting from the late 1950s...
, whom she met towards the end of her student days and had worked for. Their affair is said to have inspired the movie Darling
Darling (film)
Darling is a 1965 British comedy/drama film written by Frederic Raphael, directed by John Schlesinger, and starring Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde, and Laurence Harvey. It is considered one of Schlesinger's best films and an insightful satire of mid-sixties British culture...
(1966). Boty and Goodwin's Cromwell Road flat became a central hang-out for many artists, musicians, and writers, including Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
(whom Boty brought to England) Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
, Blake
Peter Blake
Peter Blake may refer to:*Peter Blake , British pop artist*Peter Blake , New Zealand yachtsman*Peter Blake Scottish-born actor...
, Michael White
Michael White (producer)
Michael White is a British theatrical impresario and film producer.Theatre impresario and film producer Michael White was born in Scotland on 16 January 1936, and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris....
(producer of The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the 1975 film adaptation of the British rock musical stageplay, The Rocky Horror Show, written by Richard O'Brien. The film is a parody of B-movie, science fiction and horror films of the late 1940s through early 1970s. Director Jim Sharman collaborated on the...
and later Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a 1974 British comedy film written and performed by the comedy group Monty Python , and directed by Gilliam and Jones...
), playwright Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.-Early life:...
, Troy Kennedy Martin
Troy Kennedy Martin
Troy Kennedy Martin was a Scottish-born film and television screenwriter best known for creating the long running BBC TV police series Z-Cars, and for the award-winning 1985 anti-nuclear drama Edge of Darkness...
(screenwriter for The Italian Job
The Italian Job
The Italian Job is a 1969 British caper film, written by Troy Kennedy Martin, produced by Michael Deeley and directed by Peter Collinson. Subsequent television showings and releases on video have established it as an institution in the United Kingdom....
), satirical playwright John McGrath, dramatist Dennis Potter
Dennis Potter
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English dramatist, best known for The Singing Detective. His widely acclaimed television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture.-Biography:Dennis Potter was born...
, and English performance poet Roger McGough
Roger McGough
Roger Joseph McGough CBE is a well-known English performance poet. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Poetry Please and records voice-overs for commercials, as well as performing his own poetry regularly...
.
Her husband Goodwin, who would later co-found the radical journal Black Dwarf, is said to have encouraged Boty to include political content in her paintings. Her paintings did become more overtly critical over time. Countdown to Violence depicts a number of harrowing current events, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
, the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, and the Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
race riot
Race riot
A race riot or racial riot is an outbreak of violent civil disorder in which race is a key factor. A phenomenon frequently confused with the concept of 'race riot' is sectarian violence, which involves public mass violence or conflict over non-racial factors.-United States:The term had entered the...
s. Cuba Si (1963) references the Cuban revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
. The collaged painting It's a Man's World I (1964) juxtaposes images of The Beatles, Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
, Lenin, Muhammed Ali, Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, and other men, suggesting that despite male domination in Western society, the notion of masculinity itself might be fracturing. Boty continued her analysis of male privilege with It's a Man's World II (1965–66) in which she redisplays female nudes from fine art and soft-core pornographic sources, calling attention to men's easy access to sexualized female bodies.
In June 1965, Boty became unexpectedly pregnant. During a prenatal exam, a tumor was discovered and she was diagnosed with cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
(malignant Thymoma
Thymoma
Thymoma is a tumor originating from the epithelial cells of the thymus. Thymoma is an uncommon tumor, best known for its association with the neuromuscular disorder myasthenia gravis. Thymoma is found in 15% of patients with myasthenia gravis. Once diagnosed, thymomas may be removed surgically...
). She refused to have an abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
in order to receive chemotherapy
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is the treatment of cancer with an antineoplastic drug or with a combination of such drugs into a standardized treatment regimen....
treatment that would have harmed the fetus. Instead Boty smoked marijuana to ease the pain of her terminal condition during her pregnancy. She continued to entertain her friends and even sketched The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band, formed in London in April 1962 by Brian Jones , Ian Stewart , Mick Jagger , and Keith Richards . Bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts completed the early line-up...
during her illness. Her daughter, Boty Goodwin, was born in February 1966. Her last known painting, BUM, was commissioned by Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.-Early life:...
for Oh, Calcutta! and was completed in 1966. Boty died at the Royal Marsden Hospital on 1 July that year. She was 28 years old, not much younger than when her daughter, Boty Goodwin, died of a heroin overdose in 1995 while living in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
.
After her death, Pauline Boty's paintings were stashed away in a barn on her brother's farm, and she was largely forgotten over the next thirty years. Her work was rediscovered in the 1990s, renewing interest in her radical and significant contribution to Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
gaining her inclusion in several group exhibitions and a major solo retrospective.
Exhibitions
- 1957, 1959 "Young Contemporaries"-RBA Galleries, London, UK
- 1960-61 "Modern Stained Glass"-Arts Council Tour
- 1961 "Blake, Boty, Porter, Reeve"-AIA Gallery, London, UK
- 1962 "New Art"-Festival of Labour, Congress House, London, UK
- 1962 "New Approaches to the Figure"-Arthur Jeffress Gallery, London, UK
- 1963 "Pop Art"-Midland Group Gallery, Nottingham, UK
- 1963 "Pauline Boty"-Grabowski Gallery, London, UK
- 1965 "Contemporary Art"-Grabowski Gallery, London, UK
- 1965, 1966 "Spring Exhibition"-Cartwright Memorial Hall, Bradford, UK
- 1976-77 Traveling exhibition, Poland
- 1981 "Realizm Spoleczny Pop-Artu"-Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland
- 1982 "Miedzy Hiperrealizmem a Pop-Artem" Muzeum Regionalne, Radomsko, Poland
- 1982 "Pop-Art" Galeria "Pro", Koszalin, Poland
- 1993 "The Sixties Art Scene In London"-Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK
- 1993 "Pauline Boty"-Mayor Gallery, London, UK
- 1995 "Post War to Pop"-Whitford Fine Art, London, UK
- 1996 "Les Sixties: Great Britain and France 1962-1973"-Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine, Paris, France and Museum and Art Gallery, Brighton, UK
- 1997 "The Pop '60s: Transatlantic Crossing" Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal
- 1998 "Pauline Boty-The Only Blonde in the World" The Mayor Gallery & Whitford Fine Art, London
- 2002 "Pin-up: Glamour and Celebrity" Tate LiverpoolTate LiverpoolTate Liverpool is an art gallery and museum in Liverpool, Merseyside, England, and part of Tate, along with Tate St Ives, Cornwall, Tate Britain, London, and Tate Modern, London. The museum was an initiative of the Merseyside Development Corporation...
, UK - 2004 "Art and the 60s: This Was Tomorrow" Tate BritainTate BritainTate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
, London, UK - 2009 "Awkward Objects: Alina SzapocznikowAlina SzapocznikowAlina Szapocznikow was a Polish sculptor.As a Jew, she was imprisoned in the Pabianice and Łódź Ghettos and in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt Nazi concentration camps. She was the wife of Polish graphic designer Roman Cieślewicz...
and Maria Bartuszova, Pauline Boty, Louise BourgeoisLouise BourgeoisLouise Joséphine Bourgeois , was a renowned French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, and for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the Spiderwoman...
, Eva HesseEva HesseEva Hesse , was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. -Early life:Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany...
, and Paulina Ołowska"-Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland - 2010 "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" University of the ArtsUniversity of the Arts (Philadelphia)The University of the Arts is one of the United States' oldest universities dedicated to the arts. Its campus makes up part of the Avenue of the Arts in Center City, Philadelphia...
, Philadelphia, PA [traveling exhibition]
Filmography
Film- 1966 Alfie (1966) ... one of Alfie's girlfriends (uncredited)
TV
- 1965 "The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre" (Episode: Strangler's Web) ... Nell Pretty
- 1965 BBC TV, The Londoners - A Day Out for Lucy ... Patsy
- 1965 "Contract to Kill" (BBC TV mini-series) ... the seductive Maria Galen
- 1965 "The Day of Ragnarok"
- 1964 Ken RussellKen RussellHenry Kenneth Alfred "Ken" Russell was an English film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style. He attracted criticism as being obsessed with sexuality and the church...
's Béla Bartók (BBC Monitor Series) .... Prostitute - 1964 BBC, Short Circuit-The Park ... Pauline
- 1964 "Espionage" (Episode: The Frantick Rebel) ... Mistress Fleay
- 1963 "Ready, Steady, Go!" ... Dancer
- 1963 "Don't Say a Word" (game show) ... herself
- 1963 BBC, Maigret: Peter the Lett ... Josie
- 1962 BBC, The Face They See ... Rona
- 1962 ITV Armchair Theatre (Episodes: North City Traffic Straight Ahead and North by North West) ... Anna
- 1962 Ken RussellKen RussellHenry Kenneth Alfred "Ken" Russell was an English film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style. He attracted criticism as being obsessed with sexuality and the church...
's Pop Goes the Easel (BBC Monitor Series) ... Herself
External links
- Professor Laura Mulvey on Pauline Boty
- Pauline Boty in the National Portrait Gallery
- Pauline Boty on imdb
- Pauline Boty on artnet
- Pauline Boty Gallery, Photos by John Aston
Videos
- TateShots Issue 6: Pauline Boty (Michael Bracewell on The Only Blonde in the World (1963) by Pauline Boty)