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Collage – The Medium Linking Two Souls: Peter Blake and Pauline Boty.

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I’ve been fascinated by Peter Blake’s art since I bought his “Babe Rainbow” print in, I think, 1968. My fascination for his art continued with my collection of Blake’s record cover art and one recent (2024) release has unravelled unexpected aspects of Peter Blake’s life that impinge on his art. The cover I refer to is his design for Band Aid’s 40th anniversary recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”  released as an EP on viny and CD in November 2024.

This design struck me as familiar and I found a picture of a Blake painting from 1959-60 that was strikingly similar. The painting in question is Blake’s “Valentine (for Pauline Boty)”.

Peter Blake’s “Valentine (for Pauline Boty)”, 1959-60.

I immediately wanted to know who Pauline Boty was and why Peter Blake painted her this valentine.

A quick Internet search revealed that the painting had been sold at Sotheby’s in 2019 for £270,000. But the description told the story of Blake’s unrequited love for Pauline Boty.

Peter Blake’s art education began in 1946 when he was only 14 at Gravesend School to learn commercial art. It was there that his interest in typography started. After National Service in the R.A.F., in 1953, he was admitted to the Royal College of Art’s painting school based on a single painting that he submitted. He graduated with first class honours in 1956 and, after a year travelling in Europe, took various teaching jobs while still remaining connected to the RCA. He was a contemporary of David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Derek Boshier and Allen Jones. In 1958 a 20-year-old Pauline Boty arrived at the RCA to study stained glass. A subject she had begun to study at Wimbledon College. Boty was a collagist and painter and while at the RCA produced stained glass works, paintings and collages.

There’s considerable similarity between making stained glass pictures and collages. Both consist of cutting out bits of either glass or paper to make a design and Boty became an accomplished collagist alongside her stained glass work.

Blake had been making collages since at least 1955. Boty met Blake, six years her senior,  at the RCA and they began a romantic involvement. Blake soon became besotted with the beautiful, vivacious and very talented Pauline. Unfortunately for him her feelings were considerably cooler, but they made a beautiful couple. Blake has said “Imagine having her on your arm at a private view. I mean she was sensational!”

So, Blake painted his “Valentine (for Pauline Boty)” early on their relationship. Boty must have been inspired by Blake’s collages, and she must have been a muse for him. Her early collages seem to presage many of Blake’s more recent ones.

This reuse of Victoriana by Boty is reminiscent of Blake’s later large collages from the “Joseph Cornell’s Holiday” series and other.

Boty was the archetypal “dolly bird”, before the term really became fashionable. She wore Mary Quant clothes and was aware of her sexuality, having several affairs while still dating Blake. The photographer Lewis Morley was one lover, who photographed her nude in September 1961 in a series of photos, the most famous being the portrait holding Blake’s “Valentine (for Pauline Boty)”!

Lewis Morley’s 1961 portrait of Boty holding Blake’s 2Valentine” painting.

Exactly when Blake’s and Boty’s relationship ended is difficult to date. Boty was in a long-term relationship with the married television director Philip Saville and had other assignations. In June 1963 she married literary agent Clive Goodwin after a whirlwind 10-day romance. Both Blake and Saville were reported to have been shocked by her marriage. And Peter Blake married Jann Haworth the following month.

Their artistic partnership was public enough that when the BBC’s Monitor produced ‘Pop Goes the Easel’ in March 1962, Blake ensured Boty was among the four featured artists. (Blake himself, Boty, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips). The programme opened with presenter Huw Wheldon seated before a recreation of Boty’s ‘collage wall’ – an installation in her London flat that demonstrated how central collage was to her practice, integrated into her daily environment. If this wall dated from 1958-59 when she arrived at the RCA, Blake would have seen it early in their relationship, experiencing collage not just as artworks but as a way of life.

There were three brilliant women artists around in the late fifties and early sixties. These were Brigit Riley (born 1931), Jann Haworth (born 1942) and Pauline Boty (born 1938). Riley, Peter Blake and Jann Haworth were represented by Groovy Bob Fraser’s Duke Street gallery from 1962. Boty graduated from the RCA in 1961 and was forced to become a waitress to make ends meet. Why didn’t Blake introduce his great love to Robert Fraser and kickstart her artistic career? Instead, she jumped into marriage so she could continue her art.

Haworth left Blake in 1979 for the author Richard Severy and Blake met Chrissy Wilson in 1980. They married in 1987.

There is no doubt that Peter Blake influenced Pauline Boty’s art. Just compare her “Monica Vitti with Heart” painting from 1963 with Blake’s ”Valentine”.

And there’s no doubt Blake never forgot Boty as he reused the “Valentine” design sixty-four years later as the basis for the cover design for the Band Aid 40 EP. But he hasn’t credited Boty anywhere in his books. His 2021 book “Collage” is dedicated to Chrissy, his three daughters and Joseph Cornell.

Retrospective exhibitions of Boty’s work in 2013 and 2023-4 have brought her pop art paintings and collages back into general view and emphasised her central role as one of the important members of British Pop Art first flowering.

Credits: Photographs taken from Marc Kristal’s 2023 book “Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister”.

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A Valentine Lost: Peter Blake’s Pattern of Heartbreak.

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When Sotheby’s offered Peter Blake’s painting “Valentine (for Pauline Boty)” for auction in 2019, they described the two artists as “inseparable.” The work sold for £287,500—a significant sum for what appeared to be a simple valentine. But this wasn’t just any love token. It was evidence of a relationship that would shape Blake’s emotional life and set a pattern of loss that would haunt him for decades.

Robert Fraser opened his famous art gallery at 69 Duke Street in London in 1962 and attracted the cream of pop art artists to the gallery’s roster: Richard Hamilton, Derek Boshier, Peter Blake, Colin Self and Jann Haworth. Fraser’s gallery attracted visitors from the world of film, music and art. He was the first to show American pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Jim Dine in London. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were gallery regulars—Robert Fraser helped Paul McCartney build his art collection.

There was one English pop artist who wasn’t represented by Groovy Bob Fraser. She was Pauline Boty (1938-1966), a polymath: pop artist, poet, radio programme host, actress and dancer. You could have seen her bopping to the music on TV’s “Ready, Steady, Go”. She studied at the Royal College of Art from 1958-61 alongside Peter Blake, David Hockney and Derek Boshier.

Wikipedia describes her as “the heartbreaker of the sixties art scene. Talented and outspoken, she was loved by countless men…” Boty and Blake became inseparable. Between 1959-60, Blake painted a valentine for her, simply titled “Valentine (for Pauline Boty)”.

Peter Blake: Valentine (for Pauline Boty), 1959-60.

There’s Lewis Morley’s famous photograph of Pauline holding the Valentine painting.

Boty and Jann Haworth were the only two women among the pop artists at the time. Haworth, like Blake, was represented by Robert Fraser and had solo shows at his gallery as well as a joint exhibition with Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Colin Self.But Boty’s romantic life was complicated. She was having an affair with TV director Philip Saville (who was already married) while involved with Blake. Then in June 1963, after a whirlwind ten-day romance, she married literary agent Clive Goodwin. Blake—and Saville—must have been devastated.

Blake’s response was swift. Just one month later, in July 1963, he married the other female pop artist, Jann Haworth, whom he had met at a party while she was a student at the Slade School of Art. Another whirlwind romance. The newlyweds immediately left for an extended honeymoon in California, where Jann’s father, Academy Award-winning art director Ted Haworth, lent them his Stingray sports car. They drove to Malibu listening to the Beach Boys, and Ted got Blake access to a film studio storeroom filled with props from the Elizabeth Taylor film Cleopatra. They were still in California in November when President Kennedy was assassinated.

Pauline Boty’s remarkable artistic and acting career ended abruptly when, in 1965 while pregnant, she developed a malignant tumour. Boty refused abortion and treatment as it would harm the foetus. Her daughter Katy was born on 12th February 1966, and Pauline died on 1st July, aged only 28. The “Valentine” painting passed to her husband Clive Goodwin until his death in 1977. It was later acquired by art collector Muriel Wilson (1933-2018), who donated it to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester along with many other works from her collection.

Blake and Haworth remained together for sixteen years, founding the Brotherhood of Ruralists in 1975. But in 1979, history repeated itself. Haworth met author Richard Severy and left Blake. Devastated, Blake left Somerset and the Ruralists and returned to London. He was reported to have been unable to work for almost a year after this separation—a testament to how deeply the loss affected him.

When the Valentine painting came up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2019, it was featured in an article titled “Unrequited Love and Peter Blake’s Pop Art Valentine.” But the image had clearly stayed with Blake. Sixty-five years after its creation, it reappeared on the cover of Band Aid 40’s 2024 single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”—suggesting that his feelings for Boty, and that moment in time, had never entirely left him.

There’s another possible legacy of Blake’s relationship with Boty that art historians may have overlooked. Boty was herself an accomplished collage artist. While the textbooks credit Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters as Blake’s influences in collage, perhaps the woman who was ‘inseparable’ from him during those formative years played a more significant role than history has acknowledged. It wouldn’t be the first time a male artist’s female partner influenced his work without receiving credit.

Blake met artist Chrissy Wilson in 1980, soon after returning to London, and they married in 1987 after his divorce from Haworth was finalized in 1981. They are still together after more than 40 years—perhaps Blake had finally found lasting love.

Haworth and Severy remained together until Severy’s death..