Portrait: Pauline Boty
Woman of influence
Once seen as more of a muse than an artist, Pauline Boty's work is finally getting the recognition it deserves.
British Pop Art, a divergent strain of the more well-known American style (Andy Warhol’s soup cans et al), was a movement which essentially upended art as it was known, bringing mass culture to its shores and usurping the idea that art was essentially at odds with the common people. It was spearheaded by the likes of David Hockney and Richard Hamilton, now considered among the greats. But there was one woman also credited with being essential to the Pop Art movement: Pauline Boty.
But she was beautiful, and wore her sexuality proudly (she was dubbed the ‘Wimbledon Bardot’ by her peers, for her resemblance to the French sex symbol) and for that, her work was never given the credence it deserved.
Boty was born at a time when the prominence of men in the art world went unchallenged — 1938, suburban South London. Undeterred, she studied at the Royal College of Art in London, where she was the only woman in her year. She quickly gained attention for work that both celebrated and critiqued contemporary culture. She painted bursts of color and life; merging the iconography of 1960s Britain (film stars, pop idols, pin-ups) and imagined them through a distinctly female gaze. Her work dissected the sexual politics embedded in mass media, and she interrogated the machinations of pop culture, instead of being a nodding bystander.
Though she exhibited alongside the leading figures of British Pop Art and appeared in TV interviews and magazines, Boty was never fully embraced by the art establishment. Her career was tragically cut short when she died of cancer in 1966 at just 28. In the years that followed, she was largely forgotten, her contributions obscured by the fame of her peers, remembered more as a socialite and a great beauty than an artist.
In recent decades, art historians have begun to restore Boty to her rightful place in the canon. Today, her work is recognised not only as foundational to British Pop Art, but also as a critique of gender, fame, and representation: a challenge to the art world’s norms, painted in Pop Art technicolor.
