The only woman in the room

By the early 1960s, British Pop art (the movement that pulled its imagery straight out of advertising, comics, film stars, and the consumer world, treating mass culture as fit subject for a painting) was a recognized, celebrated, and almost entirely male enterprise. Its founders and stars were men: Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi of the older Independent Group (a loose London circle of artists and critics who first chewed over American mass culture in the 1950s), then the younger wave of Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, and Peter Phillips. Women turned up in Pop almost only as imagery, Monroe, pin-ups, ad-bodies, the object painted on the canvas. They were rarely the hand holding the brush.

Pauline Boty (1938–1966) was the exception, the one widely acknowledged woman of British Pop and one of its co-founders. Her name was in the title of one of the movement’s first shows, the November 1961 “Blake, Boty, Porter, Reeve” exhibition at the A.I.A. gallery; she was there at the founding, not a latecomer. And her gifts cut against her. She was blonde, glamorous, and photogenic, nicknamed “the Wimbledon Bardot” by her art-school classmates for her resemblance to the French film star Brigitte Bardot, and the art world treated her as a face more than a painter. The asymmetry was made literal on film. In 1962 the director Ken Russell made a BBC documentary, Pop Goes the Easel, featuring Boty alongside Blake, Boshier, and Phillips. Sixteen of her works appear on screen, yet, unlike her three male co-stars, she is never once asked to talk about her own work. That gap, the woman whose paintings are shown but whose voice is withheld, is the exact subject she would turn into a pair of pictures.

It would be easy to flatten Boty into a tidy proto-feminist martyr, blonde genius, early death, and she has been. The truer picture has more friction in it: real ambition, real inner conflict, conventional middle-class pulls alongside the radical ones. But the bare facts of how the world handled her, glamorous woman painter taken for a model, are not invented, and they are the soil the work grows out of. She had watched, from inside the room, exactly who got to be a person and who got to be looked at. Around 1964 she set out to paint it.