ABSTRACT
Pauline Boty's short life was the stuff of melodrama: she was a young artist, an occasional bit player in films, and a figure at the center of a burgeoning mod scene in London who worked and played with other painters such as Peter Blake, David Hockney, and Derek Boshier. Boty's painting, under jukebox modernism, places the work within the framework of heightened emotional popular consumption directed at women: Douglas Sirk-style melodrama and popular music's screaming, weeping girls. Tate describes the "melancholic pleasures" of the painting and pop song. Boty's embrace of fan culture reaches a crescendo in paintings like Celia Birtwell and Some of Her Heroes, which features Boty's friend and textile designer. Boty effectively uses the material culture of fandom, directed at young women, to critique how that culture directed ways of looking. Boty's paintings offer different conflations of female experience, sometimes sexual, under the aegis of celebrity culture.
