It is quite educational doing this blogging thing. A couple
of days ago when I was researching Adrian Mitchell
I read that he and his wife had adopted a child who was the daughter of
their friends the artist Pauline Boty and Clive Goodwin. This
aroused my curiosity because I hadn’t heard of Pauline Boty before, so I looked
her up as well.
What I found was quite fascinating for me because I have
always been interested in people who had a brief flirtation with fame and then
disappeared into obscurity or made an important contribution to the arts and
have been unfairly overlooked. Pauline was one of the founders of the British Pop
Art movement along with the likes of David Hockney and Peter Blake.
They went on to be world famous, but Pauline has been largely forgotten.
Another thing I have noticed about Pauline is that she was a very beautiful
woman. This might have been to her detriment because she might have only been
noticed for her looks and not for her work.
Pauline was born in 1938 and after attending art school in
Wimbledon where her classmates called her ‘The Wimbledon Bardot’ because of her
looks, she studied stained glass design at the Royal College Of Art. She wanted
to study painting but couldn’t because admissions for women to that course were
limited due to the institutionalised sexism of the times. That didn’t stop her
painting in her spare time though. She was a bit of a polymath. As well as
painting, Pauline also published poetry, acted, and also was a leading light in
a group called the Anti-Uglies who protested against the brutalism of
post-war British architecture. Pauline was one of the artists featured in a TV
programme directed by Ken Russell in 1962 called Pop Goes The Easel. She
acted at the Royal Court Theatre, appeared in Armchair Theatre on the
telly, danced on Ready Steady Go and was one of Michael Caine’s girlfriends
in the film Alfie. When Bob Dylan first visited Britain in 1963
it was Pauline who showed him around London.
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| Colour Her Gone. |
It should be for her art that Pauline is remembered. I have
looked at her work on the internet and am most impressed. Her paintings are
bright and exuberant, erotic and sensual. There are two pictures featuring Marilyn
Monroe called The Only Blonde In The World and Colour Her Gone which
particularly caught my eye. There is another one as well called ironically, It’s
A Man’s World which celebrates her femininity. I also liked a picture
called 5 4 3 2 1 which took its title from a song by Manfred Mann.
If there was an exhibition of her work near me, I would certainly go along and
see it.
Pauline’s life ended tragically young. After a whirlwind
romance she married Clive Goodwin. In 1965 she became pregnant. During a
pre-natal test it was discovered that she had leukemia. She refused chemotherapy because
it would harm her child and she died at the age of only 28 just a few months
after the birth of her daughter. Her
daughter also died tragically from a heroin overdose in 1995.
After she died Pauline’s paintings were stored away in a
barn on her brother’s farm where they remained, gathering dust for over thirty
years. Pauline’s place in British art was largely forgotten until recent years.
In 2013 a retrospective exhibition of her work was finally held in
Wolverhampton and later Chichester. It is due to the sexism in British art that
she has been overlooked for so long. The same applies to literature. The
leading figures in British writing in the 50’s were called The Angry Young
Men, what about the angry young women?. Also, the other day I looked in a
poetry anthology I have called Children Of Albion published in 1969
which features 65 poets of the era. There are only five female poets in it,
what a disgrace.
In the 1960’s, because of her looks everyone was in love with
Pauline Boty. I read this by Sabine Durrant who said in 1993, “Even now, grown
men with grey hair in dark houses in Notting Hill cry at the sound of Pauline
Boty’s name.”
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| The Only Blonde In The World. |
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