Pauline Boty’s tribute to Marilyn Monroe: ‘She understood what it meant to be alive and sensuous and intelligent all at once — and also very beautiful’

In June 1962, Marilyn Monroe was sacked from the film Something’s Got to Give. The production had been plagued with false starts, delays and reshoots, the budget had spiralled out of control, and jumpy executives decided it was their leading lady who was to blame. Life magazine ran with the headline ‘They Fired Marilyn: Her Dip Lives On’ in reference to the actor’s notorious on-set swim in the nude, which had been captured by photographer Larry Schiller, giving the screwball comedy some welcome pre-publicity.

The British Pop artist Pauline Boty (1938-1966) commemorated the actor’s dismissal with Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give, which is offered in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale on 20 March 2024 at Christie’s in London. The painting vividly depicts Monroe splashing about in the pool, surrounded by brilliant bursts of abstract shapes like fireworks on the Fourth of July. In the lower part of the picture is a small siren — a recurring mythological symbol in Boty’s work, which can be read here as an allusion to Monroe’s bewitching magnetism.

Boty was a rising star of the new-wave Pop art scene and had studied at the Royal College of Art (RCA) with David Hockney and Derek Boshier. Her playful collages and paintings explored female desire and objectification though the lens of popular culture, news events and adverts. There was a tribute to the heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo, Celia Birtwell immortalised with her heroes, and a painting featuring the protagonists of the Profumo affair, Scandal ’63.

Like Monroe, the luminous Boty was also an actor, performing on stage with James Fox and appearing in the 1966 British hit comedy Alfie. She understood the vicarious nature of the profession and the eternal-seeming fabulousness of glamour. ‘I mean that’s a completely false thing,’ she said to the writer Nell Dunn, adding that ‘it’s very easy to get things out of proportion and really and truly if you think about it there are millions of other people who are much better than you anyway. And — well I think it can be very destructive.’

Around the time Boty completed Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give, Monroe was found dead from a drug overdose in her Hollywood home. As the shocking news spread around the world, journalist Alastair Cooke wrote that the circumstances of her death read ‘like the epitaph of a Raymond Chandler victim… the usual melodrama of a humble girl, cursed by physical beauty, to be dazed and doomed by the fame that was too much for her’.

Boty knew that Monroe would be deified for her glamour as well as her troubled private life, and was quicker to acknowledge it than Andy Warhol or Richard Hamilton. As a beautiful woman, Boty had struggled to be seen as more than ‘a happy dumb blonde’ in the male-dominated art world, and understood that the character Monroe had devised for herself would ultimately choke her. As the star had once observed, ‘Men do not see me, they just lay their eyes upon me.’

Over the next few months, Boty painted two more elegies to Monroe that celebrated her beguiling spirit: Colour Her Gone (now in the Wolverhampton Art Gallery) in 1962, and The Only Blonde in the World (now part of the Tate collection) in 1963. The former could almost be a self-portrait of Boty dissolving into an image of Monroe. The source material is a photograph of the movie star published on the cover of Town magazine; however, it is similar to a photograph of Boty taken by Geoffrey Reeve for the RCA’s magazine ARK. A tantalising fourth image of Monroe, Marilyn with Beads — with which Boty is pictured below — was recently discovered to have been painted over to become Colour Her Gone.

When asked why Boty identified with Monroe so strongly, the actor Roddy Maude-Roxby — who had known her since her RCA days — remarked that the artist recognised the challenges Monroe had faced: ‘that she’s, like Pauline, someone who is seen by the world as very beautiful, and then exploited’.

Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give was exhibited at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in August 1962, and was gifted by the artist to a close friend two years later. It has remained in the same collection ever since. Christie’s Modern British and Irish Art specialist Angus Granlund says the gift marked a key moment in Boty’s career: ‘A trailblazing pioneer and true polymath, Boty painted, acted, danced and engaged in political activism. However, at this key period she refocused her energy on painting, turning down acting roles to do so.’

With art, Boty found a certain detachment, which she welcomed. ‘If you’re acting, it’s you who they’re criticising,’ she once explained. ‘You know, your actual appearance, your walk, what you’re saying, everything. Whereas if you’re painting, it’s just a painting that you’ve done. It’s an object which is somehow set slightly apart from you now that you have done it.’

Boty had her first solo show at the Grabowski Gallery in 1963, and it seemed her star was in the ascendant; but just three years later she died from cancer at the age of 28. Her paintings were forgotten and only resurfaced in 1993 with the exhibition The Sixties Art Scene in London at the Barbican Art Gallery — Boty offering a much-needed feminist perspective on that swinging decade. Since then her paintings have been sought out by private collectors.

Granlund describes Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give as ‘a hugely important picture, and Boty’s only Marilyn painting still in a private collection. It unites two women who were synonymous with one another in the 1960s.’

Part of Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art sales series throughout March 2024, the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale takes place on 20 March, followed by the Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale on 21 March. The pre-sale view runs from 13 to 20 March