Pauline Boty: A Portrait exhibition review

Largely forgotten until the 1990s, Pauline Boty's work is now ranked by art historians "alongside the best pop art of the era", said Rob Walker in The Guardian. Boty was a fixture of the "Swinging London" scene. Beautiful, charismatic and "hugely popular", she mixed with many of the era's leading lights, including The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Michael Caine, with whom she appeared in the 1966 film Alfie. Her bold, vibrant paintings and collages captured the 1960s zeitgeist, depicting everything "from Elvis to Marilyn, American gangsters to scandalous British politicians, race riots in America to the missile crisis in Cuba". It seemed Boty was on course to "become one of the great artists of her generation", but in 1966, tragedy struck: while pregnant for the first time, she was diagnosed with cancer and died shortly after giving birth. She was just 28. This show, the first of her art in ten years, brings together paintings, collages and drawings as well as a wealth of archival material. It offers a rare opportunity to see the work of a long-overlooked British artist up close.

One reason why Boty's work isn’t often exhibited is that there isn’t very much of it, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. As such, it can be difficult to judge quite how good she was. This show, however, makes a decent stab of it, with a nice collection of "surviving goodies". The earliest work here, a 1955 self-portrait, has the "glum house mood of the 1950s", but also manages "to proclaim her film-star looks". Elsewhere, a 1958 gouache of a girl on a beach "feels like a study of loneliness rather than a record of seaside pleasures". There’s an interesting piece of stained glass – which is what she studied at the Royal College of Art – showing a mysterious female figure surrounded Victorian architecture. It's only later that she arrives at the "signature" pop style for which she is renowned. She depicts Jean-Paul Belmondo surrounded by "hovering hearts" and "red roses", while Fidel Castro is "noisily" celebrated in a composition "full of victorious flags and rousing peasants".

Boty’s visual metaphors could be "clunky" and obvious, said Helen Barrett in The Critic. Yet she succeeded in "skewering the male gaze" with uncommon precision. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another British female artist of the time "who critiqued feminine objectification with Boty’s directness". Colour Her Gone, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe painted just after the actress’s death, contorts the subject’s face "into a rigid smile", with grey spaces threatening "to blot her out". A 1960 collage, meanwhile, sees a woman held "in a net of paraphernalia – lingerie, lipstick, dye – against a blue horizon of possibility". There is no doubting Boty’s importance. We can only imagine "what she may have gone on to achieve".

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Gazelli Art House, London W1 (020-7491 8816, gazelliarthouse.com). Until 24 February.

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