A transcript of Caroline Coon’s Opening talk for:

‘Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman’ Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Friday 31 st May 2013

We have been invited to the opening of this exhibition of Pauline Boty’s work. ‘Amazingly’ says our invitation, this is ‘the first exhibition in a public art gallery’ of her work. ‘Amazingly’ is academic-nice for an incredible story that I’m about to tell you in more gritty language.

But first, let me give thanks to all those who have made this exhibition happen:

Pauline Boty’s family.

Wolverhampton Art Gallery, with Dr Connie Wan and Marguerite Nugent.

James Mayor of The Mayor Gallery and Adrian Mibus of Whitford Fine Art.

Zoë Lippett and, of course, lead curator, Dr Sue Tate.

Now, let me set the scene: I can tell you some of this because I was there. I first saw Pauline Boty’s paintings, with her present, at her and her husband Clive Goodwin’s home in Notting Hill Gate in 1965. After Boty died I spent many hours in the presence of these paintings in the large apartment where Goodwin lived in South Kensington.

Boty’s paintings were on all the walls – in Goodwin’s office, the corridor and the kitchen. The large sitting room - with ‘It’s A Man’s World 1’ and ‘It’s A Man’s World 11’ and ‘Jean-Paul Belmondo’ looking on - was one of the most lovely rooms in London. It had huge French windows and a canopied garden swing seat covered in orange canvas beside a huge bowl filled with plastic yellow daffodils. Into this vibrant scene would come most of the cultural movers and shakers of the day to create, plot and plan - Nell Dunn, Tariq Ali, Dennis Potter, Kenneth Tynan, Christopher Logue, Derek Boshier.

Before and immediately after her death Pauline Boty was IN this cultural life, THERE, co-creating, co-present. Her art practice is an exact reflection and incorporation of the concerns and aesthetics of the progressive culture that they were made in and part of.

As I got on with my life I assumed that these crucial paintings were safe, available and/or cared for in art dealer’s storage.

In 1991 I went to the Pop Art show at the Royal Academy of Art. I was longing to see Pauline Boty’s paintings again. As I walked around the show I realised that something was very wrong. Except for one painting by Niki de Saint Phalle, the show was all male. Marco Livingstone had curated an exhibition that was an apartheid, Men Only space. All the women artists who are integral to the wide field that is called Pop Art were disappeared, excluded and gone.

I was outraged. The exhibition was, frankly, a lie. After two decades of feminist scholarship and Guerrilla Girls protest, white male curators were still wilfully ignoring reality, busily falsifying art history and not only erasing women from the cannon but also denying women their place in the public art space.

If you remember back then@ in dominant theory WOMAN was a disdained stereotype. For instance, the much-lauded surrealist expert, George Melly, trashed Dorothea Tanning as ‘nursery’. Here is Griselda Pollock noting what happened to Georgia O’Keeffe at the Hayward Gallery in 1993: ‘her work was greeted by a barrage of violent criticism in which a male-art-critical establishment crawled over the surfaces of her paintings to reassure themselves that she wasn’t any good at it so they would not have to confront the complex articulation of women’s perspective and sensibility on life, beauty, nature, belonging, displacement and desire.’

It was at about this time that two people who helped to overturn this apartheid politics of art selection came to visit me: Professor David Mellor and Dr Sue Tate. Professor Mellor was curating his ‘The Sixties Art Scene in London’ for the 1993 Barbican exhibition. And Dr Tate was beginning her research.

David Mellor found Pauline Boty’s paintings rotting and dust covered in her brother’s garage. He was moved to tears when he first saw them. He had them restored. And he included Boty’s work with EIGHT more women artists in his Barbican exhibition. By including more women beside their male art colleagues than had ever before been included in a public art gallery exhibition, Mellor made his show history changing. The white male art establishment went berserk. They went to war. Mellor was told that male artists X, Y and Z would withdraw their work if the Boty paintings were not removed from the exhibition. Mellor stood his ground and his inclusive curatorial intelligence gave the show the humanity and truth of real life.

But, the history-falsifying Men Only exclusionists were not finished. I was invited to talk about the Barbican exhibition on BBC 2. In reply to a question about Pauline Boty’s painting, put to him by Richard Cork, Waldemar Januszczak sneered ‘Oh, Pauline Boty, she’s a bad painter. She’s just a dolly bird’. Managing to contradict Januszezak, I said: ‘You are absolutely wrong. Pauline Boty is a superb painter. And, she was just as glamorous as the glamorous men around her like David Hockney with his dyed blond hair and his gold lamé jacket.’

What permanently altered art history, and sealed the position of Pauline Boty in her rightful place as a vanguard innovator in the Pop Art movement, were the two co-operating shows at Whitford Fine Art and The Mayor Gallery in 1998 . James Mayor was the ideal person to aid this Women Included revolution. Ever since I was an art student I have gone to the Mayor Gallery sure of seeing art by women artists from Leonor Fini to Hannah Höch and recently Dadamaino. From 1998 onwards - the year that ‘The Only Blond In the World’ book to accompanied the Mayor/Whitford exhibitions was published with foundation essays by Mellor and Tate - I don’t think you’ll find any book on Pop Art that fails to include Pauline Boty.

Pauline Boty’s paintings are here in Wolverhampton Art Gallery today by chance and luck, yes, but mostly through the perspicacity of a few people who understood not only that they are superb works of art in themselves but that they need to be seen as evidence of the extent to which art history was falsified by the exclusion of so much art by women.

What I’ve outlined here is an amazing story of reconnection, a sometimes- violent struggle to place women artists and their works back into the communities and contexts they lived and worked in.

In this exhibition we see Pauline Boty feeling and finding her way. She is speaking without finishing@ Had she lived she might have found a way of connecting with the many other vanguard women artists of her time and, today, I’m sure she would have loved political engagement with Riot Grrrls, and Girl Power and Slut Walkers and Pussy Riot

Perhaps, as the exhibition tours, young women and men who support for example, The Woman’s Room, Hollaback! and The Everyday Sexism Project will see these paintings and be inspired and have their spirits raised as my spirits were raised when I first saw them as a student so many years ago.

After all, art does have the power to change human identity and the nature of society.

The evidence is here in Pauline Boty’s telling, beautiful, valuable, tough and precious works of art!

© Caroline Coon 2013