The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.
Important Art by Pauline Boty
Progression of Art
1961
Gershwin
This 1961 work is an early example of Boty's forays into "collage painting", consisting of a series of geometric panels and abstract shapes rendered in vibrant blues, oranges and yellows. It was produced in the year that she graduated from the Royal College of Art. Whereas in her studies she had been constrained by the disciplinary limits of her stained glass course, having moved on from the restrictive space of the institution she was now able to pursue her real interests in paint. Gershwin however still demonstrates the way in which Boty was inspired by stained glass techniques, with the artist splitting the space of the canvas into different sections and geometric shapes to make up the whole picture. The geometric panels which make up the piece are reminiscent of historical stained glass or mosaic techniques.
Despite these echoes of historical forms, the shapes rendered are also very contemporary, suggestive of early 1960s advertising and packaging. The bright, primary colors are also similar to the color schemes that began to appear in youth-orientated media in this time, such as magazines, clothes advertising and album covers. Boty, as an artist deeply invested in this youth media combined this sensibility with the skills that she learned in art school. Similar color palettes and collage effects can be seen in the work of her contemporaries, such as Peter Blake.
The title Gershwin is likely a reference to George Gershwin, the extremely popular American jazz composer. This allusion is demonstrative of the way in which Boty took her inspirations from the other media around her. She was not afraid to reference "low media" such as jazz music, even in this early stage of her work and when not working in a figurative style. Early pieces such as this established the background and framed geometric style that Boty then continued to develop through her experimentation with "collaged" figuration.
Oil on board - Private Collection
1963
The Only Blonde in the World
This painting uses the same vibrant color palette and abstract shapes as Boty's earlier work, but includes a painted likeness of Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood celebrity. This image appears in a panel, again showing the influence of stained glass work and collage. Monroe herself takes up a slim panel of the canvas, strutting along in a glamorous white dress, heels and fur, with swept up blonde locks. Like many of Boty's image references, this is likely copied directly from a press shot, perhaps at the movie premiere for The Seven Year Itch in 1955. On both sides of the canvas, the image of Monroe is squeezed by abstract green, red and purple shapes, almost threatening to overwhelm her.
Throughout her career, Boty was fascinated with the figure of Marilyn Monroe. She felt an affinity with this most modern of starlets, the ultimate blonde bombshell, who simultaneously represented an era of more open female sexuality and the confinements of this sexualisation. Monroe was both powerful and oppressed due to her beauty, and Boty felt sympathetic to this situation. She, too, struggled throughout her career to express her female sexuality while also navigating the ways in which she was objectified as a beautiful woman by critics, friends and the media. "The fact that Boty was a woman dealing with representations of female sexuality at that time makes her interesting," says curator Chris Stephens, "Many male artists of the period explored popular images of female glamour, like the pin-up, but it was a boy's game. As a woman, she looked at representations of sex and sexuality in a very different way". Boty was all too often typecast as a blonde bimbo in her own acting roles, and often not taken seriously as a painter due to this. As Scene magazine proclaimed in 1962, "Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have large beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and a blonde and you have PAULINE BOTY". This press clipping reveals the characteristation of Boty as a novelty, and as an aestheticized and fantastic figure.
In The Only Blonde in the World, Monroe is a figure who is at a distance from herself. Rather than a real person, with thoughts, opinions, flaws and desires, Monroe is presented simply as an abstract fantasy, the epitome of femininity and sexual attractiveness. The title, "The Only Blonde in the World", suggests that Monroe is the standard by which all other (blonde) women are judged. Boty's ironic title mocks its own ludicrousness, exposing the way in which so many beautiful women are positioned as similar fantasies by the profoundly misogynist and heteronormative society of the early 1960s.
Oil paint on canvas - The Tate St Ives, UK
1963
My Colouring Book
My Colouring Book again reproduces the distinct framing of collage and stained glass, deploying imagery familiar from 1960s media alongside bright blocks of color and snatches of text. The painting is a line by line visualisation of the popular song 'My Colouring Book', as sung by Barbara Streisand in 1963 and Dusty Springfield in 1964. The canvas is split into six sections, partially mimicking a girl's comic magazine. Each segment represents a different idea expressed in the lyrics of the song. The line "These are the eyes that watched him as he walked away, color them grey", is illustrated by a pair of round grey and then-fashionable sunglasses shielding a ghostly face, subtly suggesting the denizens of 'Swinging London'. A blue love heart, rendered in an almost childlike form is captioned "This is the heart that thought He would always be true, Color it blue". "These are the arms that held him, and touched him, then lost him, somehow, color them empty, now" is accompanied by a picture of an anonymous blonde grasping an empty, white silhouette. In the bottom right, a chunky green beaded necklace; "These are the beads I wore, until she came between, color them green". Then a detailed image of a stylish but uninhabited bedroom, as if in an advert, "This is the room I sleep in, walk in and weep in, hiding, that nobody sees, color it lonely, please". Then finally, a stereotypical movie "Bad boy", smoking in a leather jacket; "This is the boy, the one I depended upon, Colour him gone."
This careful visualisation of the song's lyrics reflected the fact that Boty was actually engaged with, and referenced, the media that women were confronted with at the time. She "did not adopt the cool detachment expected of Pop artists and... gave form to the emotional experience of the female fan." This idea is exemplified by the manner in which the painting essentially follows the instructions of the song, Boty following along with the disembodied female narrator, who begins by asking the listener if they have "crayons ready? Very well, begin to color me..." In doing so, Boty is sympathetic with the plight of the heartbroken woman and the difficulties of the female experience. But at the same time, she is demonstrating the way in which women's media of the time reduces these experiences to a melancholic array of stock images and colors, which they are then invited to childishly depict in crayon. My Colouring Book identifies with the daily experience of teenage girls in the 1960s, and the loss and heartbreak they may feel when mistreated by men, but simultaneously highlights the way in which this experience was infantilised and made melodramatic in "girls' magazines, romance movies, and popular songs.
Oil on canvas - Muzeum Sztuki, Poland
1963
Scandal '63
Scandal '63 is a painting that features a representation of Christine Keeler, the young woman at the centre of the Profumo scandal, against a red and churning background, watched over by the men implicated in it. It is one of Boty's most explicitly political paintings, and is highly sought after as one that has been lost for many decades. There are only a few surviving images of the piece, and is regarded as something of a 'lost masterpiece' by Boty fans and scholars. It was painted shortly after her marriage to Clive Goodwin, whose left-wing activism may have crystallised Boty's awareness of the intersections between sexual and party politics.
The Profumo scandal rocked the political establishment of the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. The notion that the "respectable" Secretary of State for War John Profumo, could have had an affair with a 19 year-old would-be model Keeler, whilst she also was involved with a high ranking Soviet Naval Captain at the height of the Cold War, shattered the illusion of respectability maintained by the Westminster establishment. It was then soon discovered that their mutual friend, socialite Steven Ward, was involved in organising other sexual relationships between prominent upper-class figures and Keeler (or with her friend Mandy Rice-Davies). Previously hushed-up sexual relationships were thrown into the spotlight, and the illusion of respectability so carefully maintained by political figures in the 1950s and early 1960s was shattered.
Christine Keeler became a symbol of the new sexual freedom of the age. To the majority of the public this meant she was, as described in the press, a "tart" or "slut", but for some of the younger generation (like Boty) Keeler became a glamorous youth culture icon. To these iconoclasts she was beautiful, brazen, sexually liberated and posed a challenge to the stale establishment figures of the government (who desired her even as they decried her actions). Keeler proved to be even more provocative when in 1963, after the scandal had broken, she posed in a semi-nude photoshoot with magazine photographer Lewis Morley. The photographs from the shoot became symbolic of her liberation and rebellious status.
Boty's painting takes an image from the Morley photos and places Keeler squarely in the centre of the canvas, dominating the picture. She is put against a searing red background, and surrounded by sensuous swirls of flowers. Positioned in a band at the very top of the canvas are the men involved in the scandal. Keeler herself is the focus of the piece and the supposedly important and influential men are secondary accessories to her depiction. Steven Ward, Profumo, and two other men are figured; Lucky Gordon, a jazz singer, and Rudolph Fenton, two black men with which Keeler also had affairs. Sue Tate notes that within Boty's painting these two men "are given equal weight to the much better-known white men and their presence brings attention to the dynamics of race and gender within which blacks and women are reduced to pawns in a wider power game."
Oil on board - Lost
1965
It's a Man's World I and II
Boty's diptych It's a Man's World I and II is in many ways a culmination of the different elements of her work leading up to the point at which it was created. Formally, collage effects are combined with bright, simple backgrounds, whilst in content it contains examinations of gender politics and the nature of popular media. On the left-hand side, against an almost naïvely scenic blue seaside background, is a central panel of images of the nude female body. Although obviously a subject with an incredibly long history in artistic practice, Boty's collage questions the difference between the male and female gaze in relation to the human body. Are these women positioned as sexually liberated, beautiful and confident in their nudity? Or are they objectified, often anonymously cropped without their feet or faces? She asks us to consider why this imagery, which she drew from soft-porn magazines, were produced (to accommodate the male gaze). For this reason, they are rendered in their original form as one-dimensional women. Rather than being real and complicated people who are sexually free, their sexuality is co-opted for the sake of a male viewer and their non-aesthetic values go unappreciated.
The two sides of the canvas are divided by a thick black line, with the other side of the diptych made up of representations of men. The "male" side of the panel is set against a palatial background of manicured lawns and grand verandas. Whilst the passive images of women are shown amongst nature, the active men are amongst industry and wealth. Boty includes her male "heroes", those she admires intellectually, personally, aesthetically, or artistically amongst this constellation of figures. Yet even those who are "pin-ups" to her, like Elvis Presley, are fully clothed and depicted within a close frame showing only his face. This suggests that his physical attractiveness is not the only important quality - he is recognised for his talent as a performer as well as his physical attributes. In this collage Boty struggles with her conflicting relationships with men. She expresses her admiration, respect, and (unashamedly) her desire for these men. Yet, she also acknowledges a complex second layer to this in that whilst they may be good men, they populate and operate with a "man's world" which continues to divide and restrict the roles of the two genders.
Collage, paint and photography on board - Whitford Fine Art, London
1966
BUM
By 1966, Boty was extremely ill. Yet she continued to paint, even as she struggled with the difficult birth of her daughter and the pain of her now terminal cancer. During this period Boty's friend Kenneth Tynan, the noted drama critic and writer, was creating an avant-garde erotic theatre revue and cabaret and asked her to create a piece for it. Designed to complement the campy and latterly controversial show, Oh, Calcutta! (referencing the French pronunciation meaning "oh what an arse you have!") Boty painted her final piece, simply titled Bum. In the image a gaudy theatre facade is painted in vibrant green, red, pink and yellow, with its curtains drawn aside to reveal a carefully rendered female bottom. The lower section of the canvas is dominated with green geometric print, in which large red letters spell out BUM.
Here Boty is once again incendiary, humorous and full of life, making a statement of liberation and cheekiness even when faced with her own death. In the decades following, it has become something of a cult favourite within the space of her work, referred to by Ali Smith as "a laugh out loud surprise. It literally bares it rear end at convention". For Smith, it reflects Boty's career and life, concluding a project that was joyous to the end. As she writes, "What a way to go, though, on this blatantly comic gesture - vital, thoughtful, challenging, sensuous, beautiful, bright and ribald".
Oil on canvas - Collection of Kenneth Tynan
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Useful Resources on Pauline Boty
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