Pauline Boty in her Holland Park studio with her now lost painting *Scandal 63,* featuring Christine Keeler and the men involved in the Profumo affair, in 1963.

Pauline Boty, Lost and Found

A long-overlooked member of the British Pop-art movement, and one of its few women, gets her due in a new biography

By Marc Kristal

It was almost exactly a decade ago, in 2013, that I saw my first Pauline Boty painting. Like so many of life’s transformative events, my presence that October day at Christie’s, in London—standing before the artist’s 1964 canvas It’s a Man’s World I—was a fluke: I’d been passing the auction house when it began to rain, and with time to kill, not wishing to get wet, and intrigued by the exhibition’s title (“When Britain Went Pop: British Pop Art—The Early Years”), I went in.

Boty’s artwork instantly captured my attention, startling me with its wit and bite—its celebration of the glamour of a man’s world and simultaneous condemnation of its violence—and I felt the artist’s personality strongly, almost as though the picture were a self-portrait. Thus I was surprised, looking at the card on the wall, that Boty’s name was completely unknown to me. And that she’d died so young—at 28, in 1966. So I thought I’d look her up.