POP ART · WORK

It’s a Man’s World I

Pauline Boty · 1964

The only prominent woman of British Pop assembles a field of the world’s famous men, JFK, Lenin, Einstein, Elvis, and answers it on a second canvas with a stack of nameless female nudes. A feminist Pop voice years before the word, then lost in a barn for thirty years.

The canvas

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Pauline Boty, It’s a Man’s World I, 1964. Oil on canvas with collage. 5 ft 0 1/4 in × 4 ft 0 in.
Private collection. Held by the estate of Pauline Boty; in a private collection (never publicly sold for a recorded price)

Look closer

Find these on the canvas above

The packed field of famous men
The whole canvas, read as a single crowded grid of male faces and figures
The picture is a packed field of male faces and bodies, each one lifted from print or photographic media and re-painted or collaged in. Read it as a ranking of the world’s men, genius, glamour, power, and violence gathered into one frame, every position on it filled by a man. The crowdedness is the argument: this is the world, and it is entirely his.
Cut and re-painted from the media
Throughout, in the way each face sits as a clipped image rather than a posed portrait
These are not figures Boty drew from life. They are appropriated images, the same celebrity-and-media raw material the men of British Pop used, some pasted in as collage and some re-painted from the source. The work is oil on canvas with collage, the magazine page and the painted hand mixed on one surface, which is exactly the Pop method turned to a new purpose.
The thinkers and the stars
Among the crowd of faces
Look for Albert Einstein and Marcel Proust, the intellect, set beside Elvis Presley and the Beatles (John Lennon and Ringo Starr), the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and the film director Federico Fellini with the actor Marcello Mastroianni, the glamour. These are men Boty openly admired and desired, and naming them as admiration is part of the honesty of the picture, it is a fan’s love-letter as much as an indictment.
Power, violence, and the jet overhead
The hardware and the political faces among the figures
A Boeing B-52 nuclear bomber flies over a grand Italian estate; Lenin stands for revolution; and the frame of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, lifted from the Zapruder home movie, sits in the field. The world’s men, the picture says, also run its wars and its killings. Muhammad Ali, the boxer, appears too (he had just changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964, the year of the painting) alongside a classical Greek statue (Hermes with the infant Dionysus), the physical ideal.
The rose, the soft counter-note
A recurring painted flower threading through the canvas
A painted rose recurs across the surface, Boty’s signature soft, sensual motif running against all the male hardware and politics. It is the one note in the picture that is hers rather than the world’s, a quiet floral counter-voice set among the bombers and the statesmen.
The grand facades, and the tentative faces
The architecture behind the figures, and a handful of uncertain identifications
Grand architectural facades back the crowd, the kind of stately European frontage that signals inherited power. A few figures the estate itself flags as uncertain, so point at them gently: a matador (probably the bullfighter El Cordobés), a second jazz musician it has not pinned down (Sonny Boy Williamson and Lester Young have both been floated), an American Plains Indian in a warbonnet, and a uniformed military pilot. Describe them by type rather than over-naming them; the estate’s own source key keeps these tentative.

The story · 5 chapters

~18 min total

London · 1962–64

The only woman in the room

British Pop by the early 1960s was a celebrated, all-male enterprise. Pauline Boty, blonde, glamorous, and written off as a face, was one of its founders and the single prominent woman in it, and the one painter in the group filming whose own work nobody on screen asked her to explain.

The making

Two canvases, one title

Not one diptych but two separate paintings made as counterparts. It’s a Man’s World I gathers the world’s famous men, painted and collaged from media; It’s a Man’s World II answers with a field of nameless female nudes. Hold both, or the point goes missing.

The canvas

A field of the men who run the world

On Canvas I: JFK and the Zapruder frame, Lenin, Einstein and Proust, Elvis and the Beatles, Muhammad Ali, a Greek statue, grand facades, and a nuclear bomber overhead. Genius, glamour, power, and violence, all of it male.

The break

A woman turns Pop’s own gaze around

British Pop put women on the canvas as imagery and almost never behind the brush. Boty takes Pop’s exact toolkit, the appropriated media face, and aims it at the system that made it, asking why men get to be people and women only get to be looked at. A feminist Pop voice years before the vocabulary existed.

After

A barn in Kent, and the recovery

Boty died of cancer in 1966 at 28, and her paintings went into a barn on her brother’s farm and were forgotten for nearly thirty years, until a curator tracked them down and a scholar rebuilt the case. The pair survives in private hands, the erasure now part of how the work reads.

1964–65

Painted, the pair

5′0¼″ × 4′0″

Dimensions, I

Private

Now in

Provenance

Every hand it passed through

1964–1966

Pauline Boty (the artist)

London

Painted 1964–65 as a pair, It’s a Man’s World I and II. Boty died on 1 July 1966, age 28; the bulk of her output passed to her family.

1966–c.1990

The Boty family (storage)

Kent

After her death most of her paintings went into a barn on her brother’s farm in Kent and sat, largely forgotten, for nearly thirty years. The work effectively dropped out of the story of British Pop.

c.1990–1993

Rediscovery: David Alan Mellor

England

The curator David Alan Mellor sought out the surviving family, located and conserved a body of work, and showed it in The Sixties Art Scene in London at the Barbican, 1993. The scholar Dr. Sue Tate then built the art-historical reassessment.

1993–today

Private collection (the estate)

Various

Through 1990s–2010s exhibitions (Brighton 1996–97; Christie’s "When Britain Went Pop" 2013; the Thyssen-Bornemisza Madrid "Pop Myths" 2014; Lugano 2018) and the art market the works re-entered view and settled largely into private hands. No public-museum permanent home and no recorded purchase price for either canvas.