The Pauline Boty film

The restoration of the painter Pauline Boty to her rightful place in the pantheon of British pop art took a further step this week with the screening of an hour-long biographical documentary on BBC4. I enjoyed Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties, despite its rather silly title, which it didn’t really attempt to justify, although the programme was certainly suffused with aspects of the spirit of that decade.

It justified the increased attention Boty been receiving in recent years, and the producer, Vinny Rawding, and the director, Lee Cogswell, deserve credit for their persistence in getting it made. If the inclusion of so many talking heads sometimes makes it feel rather old-fashioned, they do take a chance on inserting, between the clips of Boty from various sources and the testimony from talking heads, a handful of sequences of an actress (Hannah Morrish) resembling Boty, overlaid by passages from an imagined memoir written by Rawding. Perhaps devised as a solution to cost and copyright problems, it just about comes off.

Some of the talking heads are not worth their space. Among the exceptions is the artist Derek Boshier, who appeared with Boty, his fellow student at the Royal Academy, in Pop Goes the Easel, the film made by Ken Russell for the BBC’s Monitor series in 1962. Boshier, who died last year, says something interesting about the culture from which they sprang: “The ideal art college should be one where all departments integrate.” That was certainly the case at the English art college where some of my friends went in the early ’60s: Students of fine art, photography and fashion all took part in each other’s projects.

It was to Boshier that I turned, a few months before his death, when I found myself wondering about Boty’s taste in music. Apparently she listened to music while she painted. What could it have been?

In Pop Goes the Easel, she and Boshier are seen doing the Twist at a party to the record of “Twist Around the Clock” by Clay Cole and the Capris. In another scene the pair, with their fellow students Peter Blake and Peter Phillips, are seen walking through a street market to the Chicago doo-wop of Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl”. I got a mutual friend to ask Boshier what Boty might have been playing on the Dansette while she worked. Sadly, he couldn’t remember.

Boty died in 1966, aged 28, so maybe she’d have liked the Beatles and the Stones and the Yardbirds. She’d danced at the very first edition of Ready Steady Go! in 1963 — presumably not, by then, still doing the Twist — and made a painting called 5-4-3-2-1, after the Manfred Mann signature tune.

She also met Bob Dylan, thanks to her relationship with the film-maker Peter Saville. In 1962 Saville directed Evan Jones’s play Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC, casting the unknown Dylan as “Bobby”. This was Dylan’s first trip abroad, and according to Marc Kristal’s very good Boty biography, the couple picked him up at London Airport.

I imagine her liking Dusty Springfield and the Walker Brothers. But the pop references in her paintings generally came from a different vector: Marilyn Monroe, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Monica Vitti and — in her portrait of her friend Celia Birtwell — Elvis and the Everlys. Other figures were drawn from outside the world of the arts, such as Christine Keeler and Fidel Castro.

In 1964-65 Boty painted a diptych titled “It’s a Man’s World I and II”. Where the first panel has images of masculinity (Muhammad Ali, El Cordobes, a B52 bomber, the dying JFK, Elvis, Ringo and Lennon, Einstein, Proust), the second depicts what Boty sees as going on inside men’s heads: images of naked young women in sexualised poses. At the centre is the dominant image of a full frontal nude, cut off above the shoulders and below the knee.

Caroline Coon, one of the film’s talking heads, hints at a greater significance behind this woman’s lack of a face, and therefore of an individual identity. But later on the film also includes a brief clip from a film called The Day of Ragnarok, a nuclear-scare drama written and directed by John McGrath for BBC2 in 1965, in which Boty made one of her appearances as an actress. It shows her in her studio, working on “It’s a Man’s World II”. At that stage, as can be seen in the screen-grab above, the figure originally had a head, which must later have been painted over. Nobody comments on this in the film, but it’s an interesting decision for the artist to have made.

Inevitably Boty’s career was affected by the attitudes of the time, particularly the assumption that, as a woman, her work couldn’t possess a significance equal to that of her male contemporaries. Perhaps that prejudice lay behind her decision to diversify into modelling and acting (there’s a brief scene in Alfie with Michael Caine). If her looks and her exuberance were attracting more attention than her art, then why not exploit the opportunities?

We’ll never know what might have happened had her progress to a full career in painting not been affected by passive (and perhaps active) obstruction. Nor what she might have done had she not, while pregnant and in what seems to have been a good marriage to the literary agent Clive Goodwin, been told that she had cancer. She declined treatment rather than risk damage to the unborn baby. Four and a half months after giving birth to a daughter, she died. Her renaissance continues.

* Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties is on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028nyw