Pauline Boty: British Pop Art's Sole Sister by Marc Kristal
Frances Lincoln, 2023
Pauline Boty’s name will be unfamiliar to many. She shone brightly for a very short time, a figure who, in retrospect, seems to epitomise the 1960s. Optimistic, experimental, accepting of new challenges and unwilling to adhere to out-of-date artistic practices, Boty has been partially brought back to life by this exhaustively researched, sympathetic telling of her artistic career. It is a story very much of its time, a period when our culture and its accompanying commercial scene were fascinated by everything American. New York had become the artistic centre of the world and Abstract Expressionism had given way to Pop art, but this domination was beginning to be questioned. An English Pop art scene was developing, very different in tone to the American version and championed by young students at London art schools.
Boty grew up in suburban Wimbledon, and attended the School of Art there. After graduating with a National Diploma in Stained Glass Design she continued her education at the Royal College of Art, where she began experimenting with painting and collage. She had acquired the nickname ‘the Wimbledon Bardot’ because of her likeness to the French film star, and became firm friends with other students at the college who were also discovering the possibilities offered by commercial imagery. Interested in the ongoing Americanisation of English culture, these young artists were defiantly modern, using images taken from advertising and popular media to make statements about contemporary life. Boty was associated with artists who later became household names: David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Philips, and Peter Blake. According to Blake most, if not all, of them were slightly infatuated by her, and Blake admits that he was deeply in love with her at one point.
In 1962 Boty featured in a short documentary film for the BBC (the first by the young Ken Russell) entitled Pop Goes the Easel, along with Boshier, Philips, and Blake. It was a snapshot of their lives as aspiring young artists exploring the possibilities of the Pop art medium, but it also captured their sense of fun and the excitement of living in a world that was offering them opportunities. As I have mentioned in a previous piece about Peter Blake, the film is worth watching just to see a youthful David Hockney performing the Twist at a party and the four young artists enjoying themselves on the dodgems at a fairground. Partly because of Boty’s good looks, she also had a career as an aspiring actress, appearing on TV in episodes of Armchair Theatre and Maigret and as a dancer on the pop programme Ready Steady Go! and performing in plays at the Royal Court and the New Arts Theatre.
These details conjure a picture of young woman making the most of her opportunities but disguise her ambition to be taken seriously as an artist, a subject on which this book excels. Although it is important to acknowledge this biographical information, the author has been careful to illustrate the book with Boty’s contemporary work (or what survives of it) in reproductions which show that at the same time she was experimenting and developing her talent in painting, lithographs, and, of course, collage.
Boty graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1961 at the age of twenty-three. She had little money or prospects of work, yet she was determined to continue her artistic career. In March 1962 the BBC broadcast Pop Goes the Easel, which immediately put her in the public eye. It is worth examining this film in some detail, since the author devotes an entire chapter to it. While contemporary reviews of the film were mixed, it is now a fascinating monument to a special period in English art history. Boty is seen in several very different scenes, the first an apparent recreation of a dream sequence. Here she is chased down what looks like an institutional corridor by women who are clearly Germanic and wearing dark uniforms. At one point another of these authoritarian figures appears in a wheelchair, rolls over Boty’s paintings (which are lying on the floor), and pursues her towards a lift. Boty seems to reach the lift in safety, but then turns around and finds the pursuer already in the lift. At this point the nightmare ends and we find her sitting up in bed and rubbing her eyes. In another sequence Boty is shown discussing a work in progress with Peter Blake, while Boshier considers the merits of an LP cover. In yet another she is shown back-brushing her hair as she prepares to go out; there are the aforementioned fairground scenes; and a final clip has Boty miming and dancing in a top hat to Shirley Temple’s On the Good Ship Lollipop.
Shortly before Pop Goes the Easel was made, Boty’s life took a decisive turn when she met the TV producer and director Philip Saville. At the time he was closely involved with the series Armchair Theatre, a programme which showcased young British writing and acting talent. They began an affair and Saville cast Boty in several shows. She even auditioned for the part of Liz in the 1963 film Billy Liar, which launched Julie Christie’s career, and nearly got the role. (There persists an urban myth that it was Boty who brought Bob Dylan to England for the first time, and the author deals very firmly with this. In fact Jane Arden, Saville’s long-suffering wife, had seen Dylan performing in Greenwich Village and persuaded her husband to cast him in the TV play Madhouse on Castle Street. Saville and Boty subsequently collected Dylan from the airport on his arrival, but, having made other plans for their evening, unceremoniously dumped him at a friend’s party.)
As Boty’s acting career progressed she appeared in more TV shows and stage plays. However, she continued to paint, although Peter Blake is quoted as saying "I felt she tore herself in two. She shouldn’t have gone towards the theatre. She should have stayed a painter." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Philip Saville had a different perspective: "She was a bit lazy as a painter, she wasn’t one of those to get on with it. She had a laissez-faire attitude. She didn’t work very hard." The author disagrees with this assessment, and notes that by 1962 Boty had begun integrating herself into her paintings’ subjects, as if to emphasise her art’s importance to her.
The latter part of the book deals mostly with Boty’s personal life. It is difficult from this distance to fully appreciate just how magnetic her personality must have been. At a time when the young were beginning to experiment with drugs and a more liberal lifestyle, she seems to have ticked all the relevant boxes. However, behind the out-going personality and eclectic acting and painting careers, there appears to have been a more serious side, one that wanted some kind of security that would enable the achievement of Boty’s artistic goals. The affair with Saville was intense and brought her much happiness, but she could see that it did not offer her the prospect of long-term joy. And then she met Clive Goodwin.
Goodwin was a close friend of Kenneth Tynan, perhaps the most influential art critic of the time. Goodwin saw Boty, Saville, and Tynan out walking together and was introduced to Boty. The following day he phoned Saville to ask if he could invite Boty to dinner, and was given permission. Goodwin then contacted Boty, they went out for dinner, and were married ten days later. The book deals extensively with Goodwin, his character and career, and comes to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that they were a good match. Besides love and companionship, he offered Boty the one thing that she thought she needed (which she herself acknowledged in an interview), and that was unconditional care. At last she had found someone who, she believed, would look after her. However, this came at a price. As the author notes, in 1963 Boty finished a dozen new pictures, in 1964 just three. At the time Peter Blake observed tellingly to Derek Boshier, "We’ve lost our girl."
The final chapters make very sad reading. A story that began in a seemingly inextinguishable blaze of light, with exciting new art and a lifestyle to match, came to a juddering halt. The scale of the loss is evoked by statements from those who knew Boty, unanimous about her extraordinary presence. Ken Tynan’s wife Kathleen Dylan wrote about her, "I simply had never come across anyone like her, and she shook up my view of things." Author Elizabeth Luard, who knew her well, said that "Pauline was one of the few women at the time who was a person in their own right." Christopher Logue, another close friend, described her like this: "She was astonishing. A big, bright girl with a confiding laugh." And finally Nell Dunn, author of Up the Junction and Poor Cow, reminisced: "She had a certain exuberance, which was very, very attractive. A sort of energy, and a boldness. She was very interested in life, in the same way I was."
In late 1965 Boty and Goodwin moved to a new flat on Cromwell Road, South Kensington. Early the following year Boty discovered that she was pregnant. This had not been planned, but her friends all claim that she was very happy. In the previous year she had become depressed about the fact that her life had become somewhat stalled. She was not selling her paintings and had almost given up working on them, and her acting career only consisted of small television roles. It was through one of the standard prenatal tests that Boty was discovered to have cancer. At the time cancer treatment was much less effective than it is now, and she was told that the radiography that she urgently needed would kill the baby. She decided to put off any cancer treatment until after it was born, essentially deciding to sacrifice her own life. Even now one wonders at the decision, for if she had terminated the pregnancy and been cured of the cancer, she could probably have gone on to have more children and see them grow up. On the 12th of February 1966 she gave birth to Boty Goodwin and a few months later, on the 1st of July, she died.
This might be the end of the story, but there are the paintings themselves. Though Boty only completed three paintings in 1964 --Countdown to Violence and Man’s World I and II— they are amongst her finest works, and leave one wondering just what she might have achieved had she lived longer. Countdown to Violence is framed within a fairground-like poster, with 3.2.1. ZERO blazing across the top like the flashing lights on a pinball machine. Beneath the ZERO are portraits of the two assassinated American presidents —Kennedy and Lincoln— above flag-draped coffins. On the bottom right is the figure of Thích Quảng Đức, a monk who set himself on fire in Saigon in protest at the American-supported Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists. The flames that engulf him sear across the surface of the painting, threatening to envelope the whole scene. They are only prevented from reaching the images of the presidents by the ammunition wagon which supports their coffins. To the right, there is an image of a white policemen with a Black protester in a neck-hold being dragged away from the race riots which took place in May of that year in Birmingham, Alabama. In the centre, amid the flames, a hand holding secateurs is cutting the stem of a deep red rose in full bloom, a symbol of female sexuality. Whereas many of Boty’s previous works were playful expressions of contemporary ideas, Countdown is explicit in its condemnation of the modern world. The 'countdown' is to death and destruction, intolerance and injustice, highlighting the failure of governments to escape the cycle of violence: an overtly political statement and one which is more than relevant today.
The book ends with a detailed account of what happened to Boty’s husband and daughter. Clive Goodwin went on to run a very successful literary agency, but while he was in America finalising a deal he was taken seriously ill. He collapsed, after vomiting violently, in the foyer of the Beverly Wilshire hotel, and since he was not a resident there the hotel called the police. They found him unresponsive and, assuming that he was drunk, handcuffed him and took him to their local station, where he was placed in the drunk tank to sleep it off. He was found dead the following morning, having suffered a massive brain haemorrhage. Boty and Goodwin’s daughter, after a troubled upbringing, showed talent in both visual arts and writing, but died of a drug overdose just after she had been accepted to study for an MFA in Creative Writing at CalArts.
Ultimately one is left with a number of unanswerable 'what if' questions. What if Boty had not become pregnant; what if she had concentrated more on her art than her acting; what if her cancer had been caught sooner? If she had lived for another thirty years, what mightn’t she have achieved? Although her work is not commonly known, for those who study the progression of English Pop art she remains a major figure. In many ways she epitomises her epoch: youthful, undeniably beautiful, and determined to pursue her career in her own way. Those whom the gods love die young, and this book is a fitting memorial to a great female artist who should be widely celebrated.--Paul Flux
