Pauline Boty’s Sex-Positive Pop Art Is Having a Moment

As a beautiful blonde woman, whose looks frequently distracted from her talent and intelligence, British Pop artist Pauline Boty felt a natural affinity with Marilyn Monroe. Boty painted her on a number of occasions, but while Andy Warhol and other male Pop artists tended to focus on Monroe as a passive sex symbol, Boty’s portrayals are more empathetic. In Colour Her Gone (1962), for instance, painted shortly after Monroe’s tragic death by suicide, Boty surrounds her heroine with roses, two grey abstract panels on either side. Only four years later, Boty herself would be dead at only 28 years old. Diagnosed with cancer while pregnant, she refused the treatment which may have saved her in order to save her child.

After her death, Boty fell into obscurity, although thankfully her sister-in-law Bridget Boty saved her paintings. It wasn’t until the 1990s, thanks to the work of art historians such as Sue Tate and David Alan Mellor, that the art world slowly began to appreciate her significance.

Now, over two decades later, Boty finally seems poised to claim her rightful place in the canon. Last year she broke her auction record when With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo (1962), her lustful portrayal of the French New Wave actor, sold for £1.2 million ($1.5 million) at Sotheby’s. In October, a new biography, Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister, was published by journalist Marc Kristal, and a documentary, Boty: The Life and Times of a Forgotten Artist, is currently in production. The film will preview next February at Gazelli Art House in London, which is currently holding a Boty retrospective, “Pauline Boty: A Portrait.” Collectors, disappointed to discover that it was not a selling show, have joined a lengthy waiting list.

Nonetheless, the show is a comprehensive retrospective that allows visitors to see Boty’s portraits of film stars such as Belmondo and Monroe alongside her more political works, early collages, and stained-glass pieces. “What we have tried to do with this show is to portray an all-encompassing portrait of Pauline Boty,” Mila Askarova, director of Gazelli Art House and curator of the show, told Artsy via email. “We tried to incorporate the hard work that has been done to date of building on her legacy, and to champion this alongside the recent and ongoing projects that only feed into the importance of Boty as an artist and as a seminal figure representative of the times.”

Boty’s star shined bright in her all-too-short career. She exhibited with all the leading figures of British Pop, including its godfather Peter Blake, and had a well-received solo show in London in 1963. She can be seen dancing joyfully with Blake in Ken Russell’s 1962 documentary Pop Goes the Easel and has a cheeky cameo opposite Michael Caine in the classic 1966 movie Alfie. Challenging societal stereotypes, she fearlessly embraced female sexuality, both in life and work, and brought a uniquely feminist perspective to British Pop art, which was virtually an all-boys club at the time.

“In a male-dominated movement, making work from a female perspective was truly radical,” Sue Tate, author of Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman, said in an interview with Artsy. Boty’s feminism is perhaps most overt in It’s a Man’s World I (1964) and II (1964–65). The first painting is a collage painting of male figures from Elvis to Einstein, juxtaposed with images of fighter planes and the Kennedy assassination, while the second contains painted female nudes of the type that would appear in men’s magazines. The message, criticized by the work: Men can be sexually attractive and powerful while women are only allowed to be sex objects.

Not that Boty allowed this to affect her. “Boty spoke unusually openly about sex and explicitly linked women’s sexual repression to their social and political oppression,” said Tate. Being the very opposite of repressed, Boty discussed with her then-boyfriend how a female orgasm might be depicted visually. Describing hers as a series of orange balloons streaming out with a popping sound, she encoded this reference in the painting Red Manoeuvre (1962). Elsewhere, in 5-4-3-2-1 (1963), she celebrated the pleasure of dancing to pop music and the sexual anticipation it brought. A judiciously cropped banner on the right reads: “Oh For A FU…,” the phrase left cheekily unfinished.

But her feminism and sex-positive attitude was not the only thing that made Boty unique. “She was also very well-read and intellectual, mixing high and low culture in an innovative way that was unusual in Pop,” said Tate. “Avant-garde writers like Proust and Rimbaud feature in her work, alongside Elvis, Marilyn, and the Beatles.” While much Pop art reveled uncritically in mass culture, Tate noted that Boty brought a political critique to her work. Cuba Si (1963) salutes the Cuban revolution, while Count Down to Violence (1964) documents male violence across historical and geographical frames.

However, Boty’s refusal to conform to societal norms affected both her contemporary and posthumous reputation. “She didn’t fit into the prevailing stereotype of what a ‘woman artist’ should be—that is, someone unrelievedly serious and personally modest,” journalist Marc Kristal said in an interview with Artsy. As a result, he said, she was “portrayed in the press as more of a good-time dolly bird than a committed and original art-maker.”