Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman

Pauline Boty (1938-66) was a talented, ambitious Pop artist and also a sensuous, beautiful player on the 60s swinging London scene. She produced a vibrant body of paintings and collages that enrich and challenge Pop Art from a female perspective. Studying at the Royal College of Art, her friends and colleagues included Peter Blake, David Hockney and Derek Boshier, with all of whom she exhibited. Yet, when she died, tragically young from cancer in 1966, she all but disappeared from cultural view for nearly 30 years.

This richly illustrated book, based on fascinating original research, explores Boty’s life and work revealing a charismatic, exuberant character who acted on stage and screen, danced on TV and confounded gender stereotypes. She was an intellectual, skilled artist who also insisted on her right to a proactive female sexuality and the pleasures of popular culture. Her work both celebrates and critiques mass cultural experience and, reversing the usual sexual economy of Pop, she turned her lustful gaze on male icons of desire. In her paintings she responded to contemporary events and expressed a grasp of gender politics way ahead of her time.

For decades Pauline Boty was excluded from or marginalized in the story of art.Her life and work now resonate with current concerns and have achieved a place in art history and in the art market – in 2022 a painting sold for over £1 million. This book demonstrates how well deserved that place is.