Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister by Marc Kristal – Review

By Clare Jenkins

There’s a fascinating BBC Monitor film, dating from 1962 and directed by Ken Russell, called Pop Goes the Easel. It follows a quartet of Young British Artists as they smoke endless cigarettes in their cluttered rooms, ride on fairground dodgems, sashay around Swinging London, hold impromptu parties – and paint.

Three of the four are male: Peter Blake, whose work includes the iconic cover to The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier. Then there’s Pauline Boty, back-combing her hair, dancing the Twist in a feather boa, running away from a sinister wheelchair-bound woman in a dream sequence, and lip-synching to Shirley Temple’s rendition of ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’.

I first came across Boty at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, whose Pop Art collection is the largest outside London. There, among works by Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton and Roy Lichtenstein, was a portrait of Marilyn Monroe called Colour Her Gone. Boty was a huge fan of the movie star. According to Marc Kristal, author of Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister, when Monroe committed suicide, ‘Derek Boshier observed (that)… he never saw Pauline cry so hard’.

In Monroe, she probably saw a parallel. Both women were beautiful, charming, alluring – and objectified, regarded as much (if not more) for their looks as for their talents. Both also died tragically young. But while Monroe’s death at 36 was due to an overdose, Boty died, aged just 28, three months after giving birth to her daughter, Boty Goodwin. Diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in the early stages of pregnancy, she refused to have an abortion and rejected chemotherapy in case it harmed her unborn baby.

As a result, after fizzing into public perception like a Bonfire Night rocket, she disappeared from view, her paintings and collages stored away in her family home for nearly 30 years. All that changed when Wolverhampton staged the first public exhibition of her work in 2013, since when her reputation has soared far beyond that of ‘the Wimbledon Bardot’, ‘an ice-cream of a girl’, ‘a dolly bird’ and ‘a flibbertigibbet’. Two years ago, her painting With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo sold at Sotheby’s for over £1 million. Earlier this year, the Gazelli Art House in London celebrated her life and legacy with a second solo exhibition.

Marc Kristal’s engrossing book is a portrait both of the artist as a vivacious young woman – ‘a great, radiant sunshine’ in the words of one of her many friends -, and of the age in which she lived.
Born in Croydon in 1938, she grew up in a conventional suburban family – her father was a chartered accountant with Victorian ideas, her mother an Irish Catholic who spent much of her daughter’s childhood ill with TB.

As a teenager, Boty persuaded her parents to let her attend Wimbledon School of Art, from where, in 1958, she moved to the Royal College of Art to study stained glass (it was seen as an easy way in).

“Great personal loss”

There, her budding role as an artist mirrored the evolution of the Swinging Sixties, from beatniks through to boho, Biba and The Beatles. Contemporaries included counter-culture activist Caroline Coon, Habitat founder Terence Conran (Boty worked as a waitress in his first restaurant) and the fashion designer Celia Birtwell. As seen in Pop Goes the Easel, it was a world of bedsits (Birtwell’s was next to Boty’s), baked beans, paraffin stoves, instant coffee and the Chelsea Arts Club. It was also a world of rebellion – Boty was not only an early, free-loving feminist, but also an Anti-Ugly Action protestor, joining a student campaign against ‘mediocre’ post-war development.

It was a world heavily influenced by American ‘pop’ culture: the magazines, dolls, cartoons, movies and TV programmes – and the mood they created. ‘People have this kind of nostalgia for Victoriana,’ she told one interviewer, ‘and we have nostalgia for things that are NOW.’

These things included Christine Keeler (of the infamous Profumo affair), Marlon Brando, Elvis and the Everley Brothers, the Cuban missile crisis, anti-nuclear marches, avant-garde European films, John F Kennedy and American pin-ups. They all featured in Boty’s paintings and collages, which explored female sexuality, societal norms, politics… Works like Scandal ’63, It’s a Man’s World, Countdown to Violence, Monica Vitti with Heart, Celia Birtwell and Some of Her Heroes, The Only Blonde in the World (Monroe again).

Boty’s love life was as free and easy as she was herself. An affair with the married director of ITV’s Armchair Theatre series, led to acting roles, which in turn raised her profile. In the 1966 film Alfie, she shared a clinch with Michael Caine. Three years earlier, she’d screen-tested for the role of Liz opposite Tom Courtenay in Billy Liar (Boty lookalike Julie Christie bagged it). At other times, she appeared in new plays at the Royal Court Theatre, while her artwork adorned theatre posters for plays like Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack. She also contributed to television and radio talk shows – and as a dancer on the inaugural Ready Steady Go! TV music show.

In 1963, she married the actor and producer-turned literary agent Clive Goodwin, just ten days after meeting him. Then came pregnancy, her death and, 11 years later, Clive Goodwin’s own death from a brain haemorrhage in New York. Their daughter Boty, brought up by her grandparents, was herself to die at 29 after a heroin overdose.

So it’s a tragic tale, and one of great personal loss: of such promise and a ‘Technicolour’ life ended far too soon. But it’s also a tale of public and artistic gain, with Pauline Boty now rediscovered, reclaimed, redefined, her reputation resurrected. Kristal’s extensively researched book, including interviews with many who remember her, helps bring her back to life, Mary Quant miniskirts, eyeliner, eye-popping art and all.

‘Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister’ by Marc Kristal is published by Frances Lincoln, price £25