Pop Art’s only female icon: Radical artist and Sixties It girl Pauline Boty was set for the big time and appeared alongside Michael Caine in Alfie but died from cancer aged just 28 in 1966

• Boty also worked as an actress and appeared alongside Michael Caine in Alfie

She was an actress, a dancer and, most impactfully, a painter who became the only female icon of the Pop Art movement. 

But, due to her death from cancer at the age of just 28 in 1966, Pauline Boty never achieved the fame of contemporaries such as David Hockney and Peter Blake. 

Now, a new exhibition is bringing the radical artist’s life and works to public attention once again.

Pauline Boty: A Portrait, which is running at the Gazelli Art House in west London, is displaying several of her works, including one which celebrates the rise of the communist regime of Cuba‘s Fidel Castro. 

Another, the 1962 work Colour Her Gone, celebrates the life of Hollywood superstar Marilyn Monroe, who died in the August of that year aged just 36.   

The earliest work in the exhibition is a self-portrait that Boty painted when she was a teenager in 1955. 

The painting celebrating the Cuban Revolution is titled Cuba Si – after the 1961 film of the same name – and depicts jubilant locals on horseback, with the country’s flag in the foreground.

Her other works were notable for their critiques of the social norms of the day and the male-dominated world she mixed in.  

Famed TV interviewer David Frost chose the artist as his ideal woman, saying: ‘I’ve seen her on television a couple of times and she looks like a super bird to me.’ 

She and her husband Clive Goodwin, a literary agent, were a notable couple in arts and entertainment circles in the so-called ‘swinging’ 1960s. 

The new exhibition also reveals archive materials from her time on screen.  

During her career as an actress, Boty had a small role alongside Michael Caine in 1966 classic Alfie, in which she appeared as the manager of a launderette. 

She also appeared in several BBC TV and radio productions.

The Gazelli display also reveals video footage from her acting days, along with archival photographs – including one that shows her nude atop a chaise-longue. 

Boty was born in south London in 1938. 

She began her artistic journey with a scholarship to the Wimbledon School of Art in 1954, before continuing her studies at the Royal College of Art in 1958. 

Boty’s cancer was discovered during a prenatal exam. She refused an abortion or the option of chemotherapy over fears it may harm her unborn child.  

She died in the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea just four months after giving birth to her daughter.

Pauline Boty: A Portrait runs at the Gazelli Art House in west London until February 24.