Pauline Boty

Honestly she might be a bit annoyed at being put in here as an actress, which she considered a distraction from her painting. The men in her life seem to have decided that it was better for her to be an actress, because that’s a role for women. Articles from her lifetime were fairly open about how pretty she was and how weird it was that she was also a smart woman and an artist. The ‘60s art scene was not a great one for women, and it seems likely that people wanted to be able to refer to anything but her actual undeniable talent as an artist, because women weren’t supposed to have that.

She was the youngest of four children and the only girl, and her father started the trend of treating her as less valuable than the boys. She went to the Wimbledon School of Art on a scholarship despite her father’s disapproval. Her mother, meanwhile, had been forbidden to accept her own art school scholarship by her own parents, and one suspects she married not because she wanted to but because she had little other choice. Boty received degrees in lithography and stained glass, then went to the Royal College of Art. She was discouraged from applying to the painting school there because women didn’t get accepted as often as they did to the stained glass school.

It’s all ridiculously frustrating, isn’t it? Boty ought to be celebrated. She was an actress, a painter, and a poet. She created in paint, in stained glass, in print. She was an extremely talented woman; her seven years as a productive adult artist produced quite a lot of impressive work. Acting was a sideline for her, but that doesn’t mean she was happy about being typecast. Yet, of course, she was; she was a pretty young woman who used her wiles to her own advantage. Small wonder Boty preferred painting even when acting paid well.

Small wonder, too, that Boty’s art became more political as she went on. She created work about women’s sexuality and about sexism. She worked in collage, often using imagery of how women are portrayed other places to make her own points. It’s a Man’s World II uses the imagery of naked women to show the male gaze roughly a decade before the term was first used. Countdown to Violence has as a central figure a rose being cut, which seems to me to be an allegory for violence against women, contrasted with things like the Birmingham Riot of 1963 and the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk.

She was diagnosed with cancer during pregnancy and chose her baby over herself, refusing an abortion and chemotherapy. She died a few months after the birth of her daughter. Given the state of uterine cancer treatment in 1966, it’s possible it already would have been too late when she was diagnosed. I don’t know what treatment she underwent after her daughter’s birth. During the pregnancy, she self-medicated with marijuana, which I have to say isn’t great for a developing brain, but what do you do. It’s not as though there were a lot of great options for her, and after all it’s horrible to discover that you are dying at age 28. Her paintings were stored in a barn after her death and forgotten for decades.