Pauline Boty – The Woman Who Painted Pop Art Pink (and Cracked It Open)
Pauline Boty was not a backdrop. She was not a muse. She was not a historical footnote. She was Pop Art — and not in the sense of consumption and commerce, but as a sharp-edged mirror of her time. The only woman in the British Pop Art movement of the 1960s. And the only one who made femininity visible from the inside out. Not as an object of desire, but as political force. While Marilyn Monroe was being blown up into an icon by men like Warhol, Boty painted her as fragile, reflected, confined. Her work was just as colorful as her male contemporaries’, but carried a different undercurrent: self-awareness, irony, rage, sensuality — all at once. Pop Art with a...