Britain's forgotten female pop artist

T o describe Pauline Boty as a ‘pioneer’ is a bit like calling someone a ‘one-off’. It’s not an adequate description of her in any way. Pauline was the only female British pop-art painter of the early 1960s. You may not know of her. She died in 1966, aged 28, and her name has remained very much in obscurity ever since.

Pauline, in her youth, appeared to have it all. She had movie-star looks, a provocative intelligence and a magnetic personality. ‘She was beautiful, with this marvellous laugh: clever, very bright, very much the early feminist,’ says designer Celia Birtwell, who lived with her.

Male interviewers would ask: ‘What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?’

She hung out with acclaimed pop artists such as Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and David Hockney. And her signature paintings of the great cultural figures of the day – Jean-Paul Belmondo, Elvis, an ethereal Marilyn Monroe in a painting she entitled ‘The Only Blonde In The World’ (1963) – are striking and bright.