A barn in Kent, and the recovery

Then the story turns hard. In 1965, at a routine pregnancy check-up, Boty was found to have a malignant thymoma (a cancerous tumour of the thymus gland, a small organ behind the breastbone, not leukemia, as the legend sometimes has it). Treating it would have required radiotherapy, and radiotherapy would have meant ending the pregnancy. She refused both. She carried her daughter, Katy, to term, gave birth in February 1966, and died at the Royal Marsden on 1 July 1966, age 28. She had been a painter for only a few years.

Here is the work’s life as an object, the provenance (the documented chain of who has owned a work of art, in order, from the artist’s hand to where it sits now), and it is unlike any other in this set, because for thirty years the chain effectively stops. After Boty’s death the bulk of her output, the two Man’s World canvases among it, went into storage in a barn on her brother’s farm in Kent and sat there, largely forgotten, for nearly thirty years. She was written almost entirely out of the history of British Pop. The paintings were not sold, not exhibited, not discussed. They were in a barn.

The recovery came late and from outside the family. Around 1990, the curator David Alan Mellor sought out Boty’s surviving relatives, located the stored work, and had it conserved; he then put it on the wall in his exhibition The Sixties Art Scene in London at the Barbican in 1993. The scholar Dr. Sue Tate built the art-historical case that followed. Through the 1990s and 2010s, the work re-entered view by way of exhibitions, Brighton in 1996–97, Christie’s “When Britain Went Pop” in 2013, the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid in 2014, Lugano in 2018, and the art market, settling largely into private hands. Both Man’s World canvases remain in private collection today; neither has a recorded permanent museum home, and no purchase price is documented for either.

And the erasure became part of the work’s meaning. A woman painted a pair of pictures about a world that let men be people and women be looked at, and then that world lost her pictures in a barn for three decades. The recovery did not just return some good paintings to the wall; it proved the argument the paintings were making. It’s a Man’s Worldreads now as a feminist Pop voice that arrived early, was buried, and had to be dug out, the last work in this whole run of Pop, and the one that turns Pop’s own gaze back on the people who held the brush.