A woman turns Pop’s own gaze around

By 1962–64, British Pop had a settled shape, and it was a man’s shape. Hamilton, Paolozzi, Blake, Boshier, and Phillips were clipping ads, comics, film stars, and consumer imagery into a knowing celebration-and-critique of mass culture. Within that language, women appeared almost exclusively as imagery: Monroe’s lips, the pin-up, the advertising body, the figure on the canvas to be looked at. The appropriated-media toolkit Pop had built was brilliant at consuming the female image and had no built-in place at all for a woman speaking about the positionof women. The brush was a man’s; the body on the canvas was hers.

Boty takes that exact toolkit, the appropriated, re-painted media image, the celebrity face, the deadpan field, and turns it back on the system that produced it. What makes the move sharp is that it comes from inside. She is not an outsider lobbing a critique at Pop; she is one of its founders, using the movement’s own celebrated method against the world it flattered. It’s a Man’s World I names and ranks the men who run the world; II shows what that world does with women. And she did it before the vocabulary existed. Second-wave feminism had barely arrived in Britain: Nell Dunn’s book of interviews with women, Talking to Women, came out in 1965; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had only just reached the country. Boty was painting a fully feminist Pop argument years before there was a movement to name it. That this critique was then literally lost in a barn for thirty years is why it reads as a break recovered, rather than a break absorbed in its own time.

In the same year she finished the pair, Boty sat for one of those new interviews, with Nell Dunn, for the 1965 book Talking to Women. The line she gave there is the plainest gloss on the work she ever spoke:

Lots of women are intellectually more clever than lots of men. But it’s difficult for men to accept the idea.

That sentence is the two canvases in prose. The interview was recorded in 1965 and published by Nell Dunn the same year; it is the documented source for the line, and it is the cleanest thing Boty ever said about exactly the thing she painted. The men of It’s a Man’s World I are admitted to be admirable, clever, powerful, all of it. The quarrel is not with their gifts. It is with a world that cannot hold the obvious next thought, that women have the same gifts, and so it goes on letting men be people while women are only ever looked at. She painted the difficulty that sentence names, and gave the women in the answering canvas no faces at all.