A field of the men who run the world

The first fact about It’s a Man’s World I is sheer density. The tall canvas is packed with male faces and figures, dozens of them, each one a clipped or re-painted scrap of media tiled and overlapped into a single crowded field. There is no single subject to settle on, because the crowd isthe subject. Read it as a ranking, an inventory of the world’s men, in which every slot is filled by one. Genius, fame, power, and violence are all here, and all of them wear a man’s face.

Among the crowd are the faces she knew by name. Here is Albert Einstein and the novelist Marcel Proust, the life of the mind. Beside them, the glamour: Elvis Presley; the Beatles John Lennon and Ringo Starr; the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk; the Italian film director Federico Fellini with the actor Marcello Mastroianni, the suave faces of 1960s cinema. These are not men Boty is sneering at. They are men she openly admired and desired, and the picture wears that admiration plainly. That doubleness is the heart of it: the canvas is at once a fan’s love-letter to the men who make the things she loves and a flat statement that the making is entirely theirs.

Then the harder register sits lower. A Boeing B-52, the era’s nuclear bomber, flies overhead, the hardware of the Cold War, set above a grand Italian estate. Lenin stands for revolution. And lifted into the field is one of the most loaded images of the decade: a frame of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, taken from the Zapruder film (the amateur home-movie footage that captured the 1963 killing in Dallas). The world’s men, the picture says without a word, also run its wars and order its deaths. The physical ideal joins them too, the boxer Muhammad Ali (who had changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964, the very year of the painting) beside a classical Greek statue of Hermes holding the infant Dionysus. Strength and intellect and power, the full catalogue of male achievement, gathered onto one wall.

Threading through all the hardware is a recurring painted rose, Boty’s signature soft, sensual motif, the one note on the canvas that is hers and not the world’s, a quiet floral counter-voice running against the bombers and the statesmen. Behind the crowd rise grand architectural facades, the stately European frontages that read as inherited power, the world’s rooms built and owned by its men.

A handful of figures in the field stay genuinely uncertain, and the estate that holds the work flags them as such, so it is worth pointing at them gently rather than over-naming them. There is a matador (probably the bullfighter El Cordobés); a second jazz musician the estate has not pinned down (names like Sonny Boy Williamson and Lester Young have been floated); an American Plains Indian in a warbonnet; and a uniformed military pilot. The estate’s own source key keeps these open, so read them by type, the bullfighter, the unnamed jazzman, the warbonneted figure, the pilot, and leave the exact names loose. The named, certain figures, Einstein, Proust, Lenin, Elvis, the Beatles, Monk, Ali, Fellini and Mastroianni, the Kennedy frame, the bomber, the Hermes, carry the picture on their own.