Two canvases, one title

First, clear up a confusion that haunts this work, because the meaning depends on getting it right. It’s a Man’s World is not a single painting and not a diptych (a single work made of two hinged or joined panels). It is two separate canvases, painted as counterparts under one shared title: It’s a Man’s World I and It’s a Man’s World II. One secondary source garbles this badly, describing a single “diptych” with nudes on one side and men on the other; that is wrong. They are two distinct pictures, made to be read as a pair. Boty built them as a question and its answer, and the answer only lands if you hold both.

It’s a Man’s World I, the canvas treated here, is the world of men. It is a packed field of famous, admired, powerful, dangerous male faces and figures, lifted from print and photographic media and worked into one surface. The medium itself is mixed: oil on canvas with collage, some figures painted, some pasted in as clippings, exactly the appropriated-media technique the male Pop artists used. The canvas is tall, a touch over five feet by four (about 153 by 122 cm), portrait orientation, a vertical field crowded with men.

It’s a Man’s World II, the slightly later companion (the pair runs 1964–65, with II the later of the two), is the answer: the world’s image of women. It is a stacked field of female nudes, re-painted, not pasted, from two sources at once, the soft-porn magazine and the old-master life-class tradition, set against the blue sky of an 18th-century English landscape garden (specifically the Pantheon at Stourhead, in Wiltshire).

The square canvas (about 125 by 125 cm) shows the women headless or anonymous, defined by their “parts,” interchangeable. The pairing flattens the supposed gap between the “high” art nude and the “low” pin-up, because both, the picture says, treat a woman as a thing to be looked at. Set side by side, the two canvases make a single sentence. In I, the men have names, achievements, slogans (“I am the greatest”). In II, the women have none: no names, no faces, no acts, just bodies. That contrast is the whole work. The men get to be people; the women get to be looked at. Boty is not adding women painters to Pop. She is using Pop’s own raw material to ask why the line between person and object falls exactly where it does.