Pauline Boty was one of the founders of British Pop. A talented, intellectual and ambitious artist, she was also a beautiful, sensuous player on the swinging London scene of the sixties, relishing its pleasures. With a keen grasp of the workings of popular culture she brought a female perspective to Pop. Both celebratory and critical, her vibrant, innovatory work enriches and challenges what has been a male dominated genre. Gleefully turning a female desiring gaze on a male object of desire, With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo is a wonderful example of her celebratory work,
Boty’s talent was recognised early. Aged 16, in 1954, she won a scholarship, against her father’s wishes, to the Wimbledon School of Art in South London. Here she studied under a young and dynamic stained glass tutor Charles Carey who was very much in touch with vital aesthetic shifts emerging in London during the 50s. The Independent Group, working within the Institute of Contemporary Arts, collects ed, collaged and celebrated the raw energy of ads, pins ups, mass circulation imagery, pulp magazines. Lawrence Alloway, a member of the group, is credited with coining the very term Pop Art and the group’s discussions, their artwork and the exhibitions they mounted provide the opening chapter of Pop internationally. Richard Hamilton’s collage of pop culture imagery What is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing? is a perfect example. It was made for This is Tomorrow, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery as early as 1956, an exhibition dominated by life sized images of Marilyn Monroe, sci-fi characters, oversized bottles of beer and other low culture imagery.
Carey introduced his students to this new aesthetic, encouraging the use of collage of mass cultural imagery, and Boty quickly responded to these influences. She flourished at Wimbledon developing into a confident, well-educated young artist. Acquiring the sobriquet, the Wimbledon Bardot, she began an ongoing identification with popular culture that would inform later work. In 1958 she left for a place at the prestigious Royal College of Art (RCA), soon to be an incubator for the full flowering of British Pop.
National Portrait Gallery London
The ideas and personelle of the Independent Group permeated the RCA. Boty had already had in affinity for this intellectual milieu and she threw herself into student life. An active member of the film club she became knowledgeable about films from Hollywood to New Wave French movies; she performed in reviews – somet.mes s as Marilyn Monroe; she was a leading figure in the Anti Ugly Action that conducted performative demonstrations outside new post war buildings they saw as dull and reactionary. She went to Paris a number of t.mes s, soaking up the art and developing her passion for avant-garde French literature like Proust and the anarchist poet Rimbaud.
However, she was advised against applying for the School of Painting where Pop art ideas and artists were gathering. The School had the highest kudos and was deemed too difficult for “a mere girl’ to get a place. The statistics bear this out. In 1958, the year she applied, 32 students graduated in Painting only 8 of them women. Yet half of those women got First class degrees, while only 3 of the 24 men did so. By the College’s own standards you had to be better than a man to get in. So, she applied and got a place in the School of Stained glass. Certainly she met and went on to exhibit with key figures in Pop, like Sir Peter Blake, David Hockney, and Derek Boshier. However, outside the maelstrom (male storm?) of Pop activity and support that gathered in the School of Painting, she lost confidence. At home she kept up her collage work to good effect but her development as a Pop painter stalled.
After graduating from the RCA, things improved. In 1961 Boty was selected, along with three others including Sir Peter Blake, for a group exhibition at the A.I.A. gallery in London that is seen as the very first Pop show in the UK. Blake, yet to have a solo, exhibited what would become classics like Love Wall. Boty showed 20 works mostly collages, the titles of which - Target for Twisters (with a real fairground target) and Is it a Bird, Is it A Plane (alluding to Superman) - declared her Pop sensibility.
The following year Ken Russell chose her, along with Sir Peter Blake, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier, for his innovative film - Pop Goes the Easel – made for the BBC’s prestigious arts programme Monitor. Introducing the emerging group of young Pop artists to the British audience, it remains a key marker in the history of the movement. Her place in British Pop cemented and her confidence returned, she found her full Pop voice and during 1962-3 produced a marvellous sequence of paintings from a female perspective – among them, With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo a joyful and playful expression of female lust.
Sex was a central theme in Pop, a key feature in Hamilton’s much quoted list of pop characteristics. ‘Pin-ups’ and ‘strippers’ repeatedly appear in lists of ‘objects’ deemed suitable to and defining of Pop which has been much criticised for objectifying the sexualised woman. Until quite recently Pop art has been seen as somehow inevitably male. Yet as subjects women did, and do, find pleasure, including sexual, within mass cultural experiences. Rejecting the clichés of pornographic writing Boty asserted to Nell Dunn the vital importance of the lived experience of sex:
‘It’s to do with everything…[it] can be as varied as being alive is varied…one of the most terrifying things about the puritanism that still exists in England today is that people are guilty about sex’.
She explicitly linked the suppression of women’s sexuality to their social and political oppression and in her oeuvre she found a visual language for a fully autonomous, female sexuality. Discussing with a boyfriend how a female orgasm might be pictured, she described hers as circular orange shapes steaming out – an image she encrypted in Red Manoeuvre. A banner in 5-4-3-2-1 explicitly declares “OH FOR FU….” And in With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo Boty splendidly reverses the usual sexual economy of Pop to turn her cheerfully lustful female gaze on a male object of desire.
Jean Paul Belmondo was a star of New Wave French film that was breaking new aesthetic ground. Jean Luc Goddard, a leading figure in the movement, chose him as his lead in a number of films, including A Bout de Souffle made in the 1960. Combining her intellectual knowledge of cutting-edge European film with erotic pleasure Boty described him in a letter to her friend Jane Percival as 'the dish with ravey navel – and in this film - oh indescribable joy and lechery and slurp, slurp he’s lovely, just lovely.' In one of the monologues that she delivered on a trendy radio programme (Public Ear) Boty went on to explore his appeal, seeing him as:
'a masculine, and potent extension of the kind of myth that Brigit Bardot engendered. He lives carelessly, like young people of today, and according to his own morality. He is lawless, he creates about himself a feeling of anarchy, you feel he is completely free. He has no guilt, his freedom makes him full of a marvelous kind of wild energy, and he belongs to here, and now.'
This is very much how friends saw Boty herself – almost shockingly open about sex, guilt-free and bold. She identified with Belmondo – an identification made clear when she chose to pose as him in sunglasses and straw hat, next to her painting, for photographer Michael Ward.
In the painting Belmondo, turning to look at us over his shoulder, is painted in monochrome. We are to be aware that this is a mediated experience generated by a black and white PR photograph. Tapping into the Dionysian passion of the female fan, Boty surrounds him with luscious red and orange brush strokes, almost overwhelming his left cheek. Throughout Boty’s work the red rose is a symbol of female sensuous sexuality and here Belmondo is crowned with a hilariously enormous, quivering version. This is not a painting about the star per se, but about the emotions he generates among his female fans. The jaunty, clichéd, red, orange and green ‘pop’ hearts and the crazy incongruity of the huge rose articulates the playfulness of a knowing indulgence in media pleasures.
Boty was photographed more than once by famous 60s photographer Lewis Morley. During a photoshoot in1963 he recalled how she very much took over, discussing and deciding on poses she would take up with her paintings. With the Belmondo painting, and uninhibitedly naked, she knowingly imitated famous art historical nudes – for example reclining as Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. Then, in what Morely named “the Murphy pose”, face down, bottom up, she imitated François Boucher’s portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy, Louis XV’s mistress and object of desire. Posing with her own picturing of her own object of desire Boty collapsed the usual gendered object/subject, artist/model positions and occupied the identity of the sexually energetic artist that had been the prerogative of men. The sexual woman – see her body – is the artist, she declares.
1963 was a marvellous year for Pauline Boty. She had her first solo at the Grabowsky gallery where this painting was exhibited among other key works; married Clive Goodwin , the first man who accepted her intellectually; and found expression for her wonderfully witty, proto feminist ideas on the radio. Yet increasingly, as she discussed in the illuminating interview with Nell Dunn, she found herself seen too much as a no more than a lovely ‘thing’. Not taken seriously by most of the men around her (who found it ‘difficult’ if she voiced opinions) and began experiencing periods of severe depression.
Boty produced a rich oeuvre in which a critical awareness of problems for women within mass media runs alongside her celebration of its pleasures. We also find a serious engagement with left wing politics - the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnam War, the race riots of Alabama. The very titles of two late works articulate her proto-feminism: It’s a Man’s World I and II. Her last work BUM was made for Kenneth Tynan’s notorious erotic cabaret Oh! Culcutta - at the very heart of the 60s zeitgeist. Yet on her tragically early death aged only 28, in 1966, she disappeared from cultural view for nearly 30 years.
Boldy shattering gendered stereotypes, Pauline Boty was, in the parlance of the t.mes , ‘too much’ for the 60s and subsequent decades. However, in the changed cultural context of recent years, the vibrant originality and importance of her work, including the joyously celebratory With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo, has finally come to be recognised, understood and valued.
Dr Sue Tate, art historian, curator and author of Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman.