The National Portrait Gallery have recently announced the addition of a number of images of Pauline Boty to their Collection by her then boyfriend David Cripps:
“Over 20 astonishing photographs of Pop artist Pauline Boty (1938-1966) have recently entered our Collection.
David Cripps photographed Boty as his girlfriend, during their relationship from around 1959 to 1961.
The photographs are intimate, close-up, informal, authentic. Some are underexposed; made in low light. Boty is bathed in sunlight, she is looking right back. In some she is smoking. Maybe she’s sleeping.
The photographs elucidate her nickname as ‘The Wimbledon Bardot’. She won a scholarship to the art school in 1954, studying stained glass under tutor Charles Carey. The earliest of these 35mm slides were made when she was a student of the Royal College of Art – where Cripps met Boty. She was gaining recognition – her vibrant creativity, confidence and charisma are evident in Cripps’s shots.
Cripps’s later photographs of Boty are dated 1961. She is shown with a classical bust and her painting Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue Abstract), made that year. Here Boty is a proactive artist recently graduated from the RCA and soon to exhibit alongside Peter Blake, Christine Porter and Geoffrey Reeve at the AIA Gallery in London. The exhibition has since been cited as one of the first to show works of British Pop art.
Each of the artists selected a motif to form part of their name in the accompanying poster designed by David Cripps. Cripps, then more graphic designer than photographer, portrayed Boty on the cusp of her brief stardom, before featuring in Ken Russell’s 1962 film Pop Goes the Easel, and long before her posthumous recognition as a founder of British Pop.
If Pauline Boty, whose career and life were tragically short, is now widely celebrated, this should also be true of David Cripps who made these photographs. Cripps, as his 2013 obituary acknowledges, ‘launched the careers of countless artists and makers’. Like Boty he had been an art student – studying at the Sir Christopher Wren School in Notting Hill, linked to the Hammersmith School of Art, then the London College of Printing (now LCC). His skills shone as a graphic artist for Hans Schleger in his Fulham Road studio and through independent design jobs. Cripps enmeshed in the Swinging London art scene, made these personal shots of Boty on 35mm colour transparency film.
Cripps went on to work as graphic designer and occasional photographer for the Observer. Importantly his photography later helped establish the image of contemporary makers as published in Crafts (from 1973) and demonstrated through his descriptive and insightful portraits in the Gallery’s collection. In 1991 he was awarded an MBE for his part in the Crafts Council’s support of excellence in contemporary design.
His subjects extend to other fields; he was frequently commissioned by his friend Bruce Bernard, editor of The Sunday Times magazine, who championed his ‘unique respect for subjects’ and his use of light ‘to illuminate, not to blind.’
These photographs of Pauline Boty illuminate further aspects of two creatives lives, on the cusp of their careers. They have been cared for in the intervening period by Cripps’s partner of many years, knitwear designer and maker Annie Fewlass, who currently manages David Cripps’s archive.”
Further information with additional photos can be seen in the blog post at the National Portrait Gallery here: [link]
Images by David Cripps held by the National Portrait Gallery including the new portraits of Boty can be seen here: [link]
