English artist Pauline Boty is not the only woman whose contribution to Pop Art has been overlooked.

Americans Rosalyn Drexler (who later became a playwright, singer and even professional wrestler) and Marjorie Strider (study next to Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol) were both written out of art history. The Belgian Evelyne Axell, a friend of Boty, who acted as well as painted, made Pop Art which critiqued the movement’s male gaze, and was ignored.

But three years ago, the Seductive Subversion exhibition – featuring a collection of more than 50 works by female artists of the Pop Art era from 1958 to 1968 – opened in Philadelphia.

“That really opened up the field,” explains Sue Tate, the author of new book Pauline Boty: Pop Artist And Woman.

“Now women are coming back into Pop, which has been a male view, and we are broadening and enriching Pop so we get another take on the experience of popular culture from a woman’s point of view.”

She feels the reassessment is required, in part, because the raw materials of Pop Art were gendered.

“Its comics and fashion are gendered so women have a different take on it. They have a particular experience of it. Now we are getting to see something of what that experience was.

"It’s great because it enlarges it. It is not getting rid of what the men did but adding to it to give a bigger picture.”

Peter Blake, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier all knew Pauline Boty. They even appeared beside her in Ken Russell’s 1962 profile about the blossoming Pop movement.

Boty studied stained-glass at the Royal College of Art and was a central Pop figure. She married leftwing political activist and literary agent Clive Goodwin in June 1963.

London’s avant garde – David Hockney, Tom Courtney, Tariq Ali – all visited her Cromwell Road flat. Her striking looks got her the nickname of “Wimbledon Bardot” and onto the pages of Vogue.

She escorted Bob Dylan around London on his first visit to Britain (he had a part in a BBC drama, Madhouse On Castle Street, directed by Boty’s then lover, Philip Saville) and danced on Ready Steady Go!

The great tragedy is not just that she died so young – aged 28 from cancer – but that she was written off as a “dolly bird”.

“She was encouraged to act because she was very good looking. She was hard-up and needed to earn money so did act on stage and on screen. But it was never what mattered to her. It was always a matter of earning money so she could keep painting.”

The problem, argues Tate, is that the press portrayed her as a starlet and a dolly bird and “people couldn’t hold in their heads that she could be both”.

“So early on, up until 1963 when she was exhibiting, she could still be seen and got critical reviews in highbrow papers.

“But after that her identity as a pop persona took over and she was seen more as a starlet, which damaged her reputation as an artist.”

Not a single painting by Boty was exhibited in Britain until 1993, when she was included in a group exhibition at the Barbican. Even then, distaste for her work still lingered in the art establishment. A professor of art from the University of Sussex, David Alan Mellor, who had tracked down and found some of her work in a barn in Kent for that exhibition at the Barbican, discovered as much.

Turning point

“A number of artists said they wouldn’t exhibit if he put her in because it would lower the tone. He had to really insist on keeping her in. That was a big turning point and I picked up the research at that point.”

Tate discovered a woman, by contrast, who felt she was doing something revolutionary and overturning the old class order by striding around in short skirts and high boots.

“She felt like an adventurer going out to the world but she got written off as stupid and not intelligent, which was quite untrue,” adds Tate, whose book accompanies an exhibition of Boty’s work about to open at Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery.

“She knew all her avant garde French literature, read Proust and liked Ready Steady Go! She wanted to be both. And what happened is she snapped back into being seen as a dolly bird.”

Tate refutes art critic Waldemar Januszczak’s assessment in the early 1990s that Boty was a bad painter.

“You only have to look at the work. She could shift between doing a photo-realist representation to a highly stylised line of painting, but he just wrote her off. He didn’t see the work. He didn’t look at it properly.”

  • Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman is showing at Pallant House Gallery, North Pallant, Chichester from Saturday, Novmber 30 to Sunday, February 9
  • Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm, Thursday 10am to 8pm, Sunday and Bank Holidays 11am to 5pm. Tickets £9/£5.50/£3.50. Call 01243 774557