The darling of her generation: Pauline Boty was the heartbreaker of the Sixties art scene. Talented and outspoken, she was loved by countless men, including the painter Peter Blake. With a revival of interest in her paintings, they are growing misty-eyed again

IT MIGHT have been the year that Pauline Boty made it big. She was 28. Both her work as an artist and her personal life were going well. She had broken off a scalding relationship with a married man and had got married herself. She was painting big, bold canvases. She had been taken on by Mateusz Garbowski, an agent with an eye for up and coming artists. She was receiving commissions. She was appearing on chat-shows. She'd met Bob Dylan. It was 1966, the year she died.

The circumstances of her death were bitter. While pregnant, Boty had discovered she was suffering from leukaemia. She lived for only a few weeks after the birth of her daughter. Her friends were devastated; many are muddled even now as to the nature of her illness. The death of a young, talented person is always horrifying, but in those pre-Aids days, the art world wasn't used to it. The poet and translator Christopher Logue, who was a friend, remembers how 'shocked and depressed' he was by her death; it 'made me cognisant with the fact that everyone has a death to face; which I would say is a fair step on from understanding your own position vis-a-vis this forthcoming event.'

Another friend, Penny Massot, says: 'People just didn't die.' Even now, 27 years later, grown men with grey hair in dark houses in Notting Hill Gate cry at the sound of Pauline Boty's name.

An odd thing has happened in the course of those years. While the bulk of Boty's work - a collection of large painted collages - has been lying, splattered with plaster dust, in an outhouse of her brother's farm in Kent, her image has brightened, regularly polished by memory, nostalgia, a certain habit of mythology. For one thing, the tragedy was compounded 12 years later by the death of her husband, the actor and literary agent Clive Goodwin. He suffered a brain haemorrhage in the foyer of the Beverly Hills Hotel (where he was meeting Warren Beatty to discuss Reds) and died in Los Angeles police custody. They thought he was drunk. There was a court case: the police accepted liability and a large settlement was awarded the daughter, Boty Goodwin. She was brought up by grandparents and guardians (the writer Adrian Mitchell and the actress Celia Mitchell) and now studies art in California.

The daughter, who refuses to talk about her mother, shares her looks. And Pauline Boty was extremely attractive. 'She was the kind of person people followed,' says Massot. Friends say she resembled Brigitte Bardot - though some, with possessive annoyance, disagree and say Simone Signoret. 'She had that marvellous strawberry ice-cream smile and leonine hair' . . . 'There was this great laugh - her face would completely distort, her top lip would spread right across' . . . 'She was very voluptuous . . . quite a big girl, very tall, with lovely skin and hair and teeth - a lovely-shaped head'. And, according to Brian Newman, a fellow student, she had 'something of Marilyn Monroe's ability to engender sympathy'.

Boty, like many of her contemporaries, used images of Monroe in her work. It's ironic that she should herself have been turned into an icon - a different icon for different people. For the artist Peter Blake she was the first woman in London to wear men's 501s ('I used to say, 'Pauline, your flies are undone.' It was a reasonably funny thing to say to a woman in 1961'). For the usually laconic impresario Michael White, she was 'unique in every department, remarkably ahead of her time,' but for Caroline Coon, the feminist artist who met her only once, she was a woman in agony, the victim of male oppression.

David Mellor, the art historian, first saw her in Pop Goes the Easel, Ken Russell's 1962 film for the BBC arts magazine Monitor, which followed four young pop artists (Boty, Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips) around London. Mellor remembers being 'thrilled by these people, their excitement, their life, their ordinariness', and spent years searching out Boty's pictures for his current 'Sixties' exhibition at the Barbican. In his mind, she may be the great woman pop artist who never was.

Something, whether her work, her looks, her personality or her death, has turned Pauline Boty into a legend.

THE LEGEND began in Carshalton. Some of Boty's friends have tried, unconsciously, to romanticise her beginnings. For Kathleen Tynan, who knew her later (Goodwin assisted Kenneth Tynan on the arts programme Tempo), she was a working-class heroine. Two other close companions are convinced her father was Egyptian ('and Boty was in fact Bohti'). Another suggested Dutch ('As in Boety'). Albert Boty was, in fact, an English accountant who lived in Surrey.

Boty was born in 1938 and brought up, with three older brothers, in a 1930s semi ('normally termed 'desirable',' she told the Express later, 'I don't approve, of course, but I daren't say anything: Daddy would be upset'). Her mother, who was of Irish extraction, was weakened by a bout of tuberculosis when Boty was 12, but they lived a comfortable suburban life - family rows (her parents were protective and disapproved of her painting); sibling tension, holidays on the Norfolk Broads. Boty attended Wallington County Girls School, where she won a scholarship to study stained glass at Wimbledon School of Art. Her tutor there, Charles Carey, remembers walking into the stained-glass room to find his students jiving to Buddy Holly and dressing up in each other's clothes. At the end of one term, he says, he found 20 individual shoes under the easels.

In 1959, Boty left Wimbledon, moved into central London and entered the Royal College of Art (one year ahead of Boshier, David Hockney and Alan Jones). It was here, on the cusp of the Sixties, that life took off. The writer and director Roger Smith, who met Boty when he came down from Oxford in 1960, remembers 'actually finding that Royal College world a powerhouse of all the changes that were taking place'. It was a period Mellor compares to pre-First World War Paris or New York after the Second World War, 'in which things were suddenly opening up, a moment of hope, when a time and a place came together.' Blake, staring gloomily into a coffee cup in Chiswick, agrees. 'It was as though everything was being invented. It was only a little more than 10 years after the war, and everything was new - television was young, theatre was exciting, cinema was exciting. There were all the new immigrants and places like Portobello Road were springing up. It was vibrant, and to be there was marvellous.'

'It was the most insane time,' says Penny Massot. The image of Boty, who was there while it was happening and died before it stopped, must in people's minds be identified with this nostalgia. To a certain extent, the things she did and the nature of her personality crystallised that explosive period.

Boty was, to quote Derek Boshier, 'a great bringer-together of people'. Wherever she lived, in a variety of flats in west London, she was surrounded by students, artists and eccentrics. London was a small world and most of it sat around her kitchen table. At one time, in a flat in Holland Park, she had a black-painted loo and garden swings in the sitting-room. Before that, she lived in a house in Addison Road, Shepherd's Bush, in which Peter Blake and Derek Boshier shared a studio. The designer Celia Birtwell lived in the room next door, Ossie Clark was always dropping by and visitors remember parties and champagne breakfasts and heated discussions. Christopher Logue met her there for the first time. She was in the garden, eating strawberries.

Boty backcombed her hair and pooled clothes with her friends ('She fancied an orange linen Swedish type coat of mine, which I swapped for a pale bomber jacket,' remembers a flatmate). She spent Saturday nights in Soho at The Establishment; she twisted on Ready Steady Go ('they knew me and Pauline at the door,' says Boshier); she smoked pot, and occasionally took Benzedrine, though she preferred Purple Hearts. (After she died, Clive Goodwin gave evidence to the 1969 Wootton Committee on cannabis - he told how marijuana had helped the pain when she was ill.)

But she was also working hard. Shortly after leaving the Royal College of Art in 1961, she and Jane Percival, a fellow student and former flatmate, taught for a couple of terms in the mural department at Hammersmith School of Art. The rest of the time they painted.

Boty featured in what Charles Carey believes was the first ever pop art exhibition, 'Blake, Boty, Porter, Reeve', at the AIA Gallery in 1961. In 1962 her work was included in 'New Approaches to the Figure' at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery, and in 1963 she contributed to 'Pop Art' at the Midland Group Gallery in Nottingham. Shortly after this, she was approached by the dealer Garbowski (now dead), who put on her first solo exhibition in the gallery he ran at the back of his chemist shop in Sloane Avenue. Interest in her work began to grow.

But, like the Sixties themselves, Boty's life swung engagingly between work, fun and politics. She was secretary of Anti-Ugly Action, a student pressure group which, between 1959 and 1961, marched on the new Kensington Library, demonstrated at Caltex House, scattered rose petals on the coffin of British Architecture outside the new Barclays Bank head office. The press reports on the demonstrations tended to focus their attention on Boty, bemused by this beautiful, middle-class activist. 'Of all things she (arrow to photograph) is secretary of the Anti-Uglies]' exclaimed the Daily Express. Boty's quotations sound wonderfully nave now: 'I think the Air Ministry building is a real stinker, and the Farmers' Union, the Bank of England and the Financial Times as runners-up]' But her engagement with the cause was typical of her fervour for argument. She knew her own mind and wasn't afraid to say it. Christopher Logue saw her some time later on a televised chat- show with A J P Taylor: 'Adolf Hitler's name came up and Taylor described him as a 'great man'. Do not misunderstand me, Taylor - a wonderful historian - was talking history. But Pauline - I think, rightly - would have none of it: 'The size of his deeds no more make him great than their nature makes him good,' she said - or words to that effect. 'Right on you,' I thought. Taylor paused too.'

A glitzier side of Boty was brought out by her affair, which began at the end of her student years, with the producer and director Philip Saville. He met her at a New Year's Eve ball at the Royal College of Art: 'I saw this startlingly beautiful woman and powered my way through about 15 blokes to talk to her.' Like her husband later, he encouraged her to act, a move that alienated some of her art school contemporaries ('there was a slight schism around that time,' says Boshier). She appeared, with a modicum of success, in Frank Hilton's Day of the Prince at the Royal Court in 1962, in North by Northwest, a play Saville directed for ABC (the precursor to Thames), and screen-tested for various films, including John Schlesinger's Darling. It was between her and Julie Christie for the part of Diana; Julie Christie was given it. Blake, loyally, thinks Boty would have been much better.

During this period Jane Percival held a supper party to which Pauline and Philip were invited. 'They turned up with some musician in tow,' Percival recalls, 'and Pauline said, 'Look, I'm terribly sorry, Jane, we can't come in, we've got to go to a reception, but will you look after this guy for the evening? He's over to do a play for Philip.' The play was Evan Jones's The Madhouse on Castle Street, which Saville produced for the BBC. The musician was Bob Dylan. He sat in the corner and played 'Blowin' in the Wind'.

Memories like that only add to the Boty mythology. So, too, does the way in which she finally extricated herself from the still-married Saville. 'We were walking down the street,' Saville says, 'and I saw Ken Tynan, who I knew, and his friend Clive Goodwin was with him. I could see Clive was desperate to be introduced - his eyes were popping out of his head. Ten days later, I received a telegram which read: 'By the time you read this, I

will be married to Clive Goodwin. Please forgive me.' '

The marriage, by all accounts, transformed Goodwin. 'Before he met her,' says Roger Smith, 'he was a very quiet New Statesman-in- the-back-pocket sort of man, very alone. Suddenly, when they got together, their house became a centre.' It seemed to be a happy marriage. Massot says: 'If you'd looked at them you'd never have thought they were suited. He was straight and conventional and she was wacky, never quite knew whether she should be with Clive, you know . . . But I think they were dreamy together.' In an interview with Nell Dunn for her book Talking to Women (1965), Boty says she married Goodwin because he made her feel secure and because 'he was the first man who made me laugh sort of quite sincerely over the telephone'.

Boty was always open; she had an air of sexual liberation that is strongly associated with the later Sixties. Charles Carey recalls a younger student going up to her in the canteen at Wimbledon and asking her why she wore so much red lipstick: ' 'All the better to kisssss you with,' she said, and chased him out of the room.' She sunbathed topless in Ibiza; she posed naked in front of her picture of Johnny Hallyday for the photographer Lewis Morley. In a painting called 5,4,3,2,1, the words 'OH FOR A FU' are scrawled across the corner. And in the Nell Dunn interview, she spoke frankly about her 'ugly cunt'. 'When I was very little, surrounded by my brothers and everything . . . I wanted to be a boy. I used to pull - you know that sort of skin you have - I used to pull it, you see, and I slightly deformed it to make it sort of longer and so I used to spend all my time when I went to bed with someone thinking 'they'll find out'.'

NELL DUNN had asked to interview Boty because 'I was interested in her as a woman who took being a painter very seriously'. It was a seriousness not fully shared by those around her. Jane Percival, a close contemporary, found it hard being a working woman artist during that period. 'It was a funny time actually,' she says. 'Women painters like myself felt very alienated, the full feminist movement hadn't come in and we worked in isolated pools, mostly of depression.'

Caroline Coon believes Boty was distracted from painting by the men around her: 'Most of these men weren't going to encourage her that much because of her beauty, they were all telling her, 'You must be in the movies.' They wanted her to be the beautiful Muse, to eroticise her body and to ignore her painting.'

It is certainly noticeable that many who treasure Boty's memory are quite casual about her work. Peter Blake had one of her collages, but lent it to somebody. Michael White always meant to buy one, but didn't. Philip Saville did, but later sent it back. And when Saville talks about her work, he does so in relation to cooking: 'I used to have to tell her to scrub her nails because they always smelt of turpentine. 'One day' I'd say, 'you'll put turpentine in the salad dressing instead of vinegar.' '

A peek into that sort of sneaky sexual attitude is provided by Russell's film, Pop Goes the Easel. Here is this documentary about four pop artists, but while the three young men are given the chance, individually, to talk about their work, Boty is provided with a weird, melodramatic dream sequence (in which she is chased down a corridor by a woman in a wheelchair) and the chance to serve coffee to the others. The main discussion of her work - collages in this instance - takes the form of a trivial spot- the-source game between her and Blake. 'There's Brendan Behan in a bottle . . . That's Somerset Maugham . . . those are specially roasted coffee beans from Elle'.

It's a reminder that when the new RCA building was custom-designed in 1962, the planners didn't provide women's washrooms for the senior common room. Women artists weren't loudly excluded, but they were quietly discouraged. 'Imagine going through art school,' says Caroline Coon, 'and being told that the only woman artist of significance was Angelica Kauffmann? And she'd be mentioned with this sort of sneer.'

And what about Boty? Did her work deserve recognition? Would the panoply of pop art have been different had she lived? What we have to go on is largely the output of someone who was still learning, but she was certainly doing interesting things. Coon, who was given Boty's paints by Goodwin, was struck by the colours of herpalette: 'Cobalt Violet and Lemon Deep Yellow. If, like me, you went to pre-diploma in Northampton with a very classical training, where you were only allowed a palette of four colours including Burnt Sienna, coming across these vibrant colours was quite startling.'

With those colours Boty made big, loud images: 'A generous, extrovert use of talent combined with a Gothic delicacy,' says Coon. Mellor believes her originality lies in her painted collages - 'that way of integrating ideas from collage while trying to stay with figurative painting'. Many of her pictures are brightly coloured scrapbooks of public and pop figures in ironic juxtaposition - Jean-Paul Belmondo, Johnny Hallyday, Profumo, Lenin, Lennon, Cassius Clay. In Scandal '63 (now lost; it was commissioned anonymously), a painted representation of Lewis Morley's photograph of Christine Keeler is mounted on male mug shots. In Cuba Si, a dark-haired girl with Boty's face (interesting that even she objectfied herself) is surrounded by maps, Hispanic decorative fragments, images of Cuban insurgency. 'It's about thinking about history,' says Mellor, 'the dreamer meditating on images of dissent.'

Boty was also experimenting with images of women - 'using women,' says Blake, 'in a way women hadn't used women before'. It's a Man's World I and II is a diptych: I a jigsaw of male figures against an 18th-century landscape; II a pin-up swirl of naked female flesh. In the unfinished piece, Tom's Dream, she was in the process of painting a woman, with pink painted nails, pulling a candy-floss chiffon nightie over her head; the shape of her crossed, upraised arms against the window frame behind her makes her look as though she were on a crucifix. 'It was a new voice,' says Mellor, 'a new way of imagining. They're pictures by someone wrestling with her own sexuality. It's that that makes them so extraordinary. 'Who's to say how good she might have been? It reminds me of that Norman Mailer essay. Two nights after Kennedy was shot, someone at a party said to him: 'The terrible thing is he was a great President.' But Mailer said: 'No. The terrible thing is we'll never know.'

BOTY'S DEATH left a big hole. Her illness took hold as her pregnancy progressed, but it wasn't until after the baby was born in early 1966 that she became very ill. She had managed to look after the child to begin with - Nell Dunn remembers the baby in a basket at the end of the bed - but in her last dreadful months, her parents took over as she was shifted constantly between her house - a vast flat in the Cromwell Road - and the Royal Marsden. She became increasingly frail and was often in great pain. Despite this, many of her friends remained unaware of the seriousness of her illness until it was too late.

'It was almost as if they covered it up,' says a fellow student, Geoffrey Reeve, 'as if the less they admitted it to themselves, the happier she was.' The cancer was always hopeless, but a close friend, Natalie Gibson, remembers huge stacks of medical books in the bedroom and talk that the illness might take 10 years off her life. Others remember her despair. Massot, who visited every day, says: 'At one point she asked me to bring her some pills, because she couldn't stand it any longer. But I told Clive and he said no.'

Even in these last dreadful months, though, Boty continued to spar with life, spirited even under physical siege.

'What shall I bring?' asked Jane Percival, paralysed by a sense of inadequacy. 'Bring that delicious cheese-cake,' said Boty, even though she was too ill to eat it. She asked Natalie Gibson to bring veal and ham pie; others smuggled in 'great big joints'.

Roger Smith remembers her exasperation at his diffidence. 'She lost her temper; 'For fuck's sake, tell me what you've been doing,' she shouted.'

Another time, painfully thin, she laughed and told him what a change it was to be slim: 'It was typical of her, still managing to find something new in the experience,' he says. The last time Jane Percival saw her, she was propped up in bed, which they'd brought down to the sitting-room, with a drawing-board on her knee, doing a sketch of the Rolling Stones.

A lot of people were in love with Pauline Boty. A lot remember her with fondness and nostalgia. She probably had many irritating habits, but they have been ironed out by the intervening years. She was an interesting artist, who led a legendary sort of life and died a tragic death. Her only fault, says Peter Blake, 'was that she didn't love me back.'

'The Sixties' is at the Barbican Art Gallery from next Thursday until 13 June

(Photograph omitted)