Pop Go the Women: The Other Story of Pop Art - A Culture Show Special The Culture Show

In the late 1950s and early '60s, a new movement sees

the imagery of mass-produced popular culture, and turned it into art.

According to received wisdom, women in pop art usually

appear like objects and the artists who painted them were men.

But the reality was very different.

Pop art wasn't an all-boys club.

From the beginning, female artists pioneered a vision

of consumer culture that was as brilliant and surprising

as that of their male counterparts.

These artists captured the spirit of the changing world.

-You've got silhouettes everywhere.

-Yeah.

She was doing Mad Men before Mad Men, wasn't she?

They revolutionised what a woman could be.

I was not expecting this at all.

And transformed what we thought of as art.

He said, "You should cast it in bronze."

I said, "I've cast it in cloth."

So, why haven't we heard of them?

I didn't know them, and I'm a pop artist.

Consciously or not, for decades, critics, curators,

gallery owners and dealers have been telling an inaccurate,

one-sided, even chauvinistic tale.

Some of the most important pop artists were written out of history.

The women.

Women pop artists didn't make many history books,

but if you know where to look, they were there...

These are some of the female artists of pop.

They're all extraordinarily glamorous,

but they dealt with much more than just beauty.

In the '60s when pop as a movement was starting to form,

these women were very important artists...

they were being shown in galleries, they were being reviewed.

Other artists, their male contemporaries,

would have seen their work and possibly even been influenced by it.

But, now, they've dropped out of our history a little bit.

Their lives now aren't documented in the same sort of detail

as those of their male contemporaries.

Jann Haworth...

Idelle Weber...

Rosalyn Drexler...

Marisol...

And, perhaps the most intriguing one of them all,

at least for British audience, is this lady...Pauline Boty.

In 1962, a landmark BBC documentary put pop art on the map.

Ken Russell's film Pop Goes The Easel

unleashed a group of young firebrands,

the most radical and exciting artists

Britain had seen for a generation.

One of them was Pauline Boty.

What's that? That's crazy.

That's an occasional spaceship flying through the sky.

You get them every now and again.

Pauline Boty embodied the spirit of pop.

She engaged in it and encouraged everyone else.

She was an instigator and an enabler, if you like.

Definitely.

Boty and her pop contemporaries celebrated

the end of post-war gloom,

and embraced a new mood of optimism, inclusion, and social change.

Daring libertarians, the group exploded ideas about what art,

and artists should be.

And the establishment was horrified.

From the world of film stars, the twist,

science fiction, pop singers...

a world which you can dismiss, if you feel so inclined, of course,

as being tawdry and second rate...

but a world all the same, in which everybody, to some degree,

anyway, lives, whether we like it or not.

It was the cultural programme. It was Monitor.

People were thinking they'd get ballet, opera, you know,

none of this rubbish, this pop art.

People wrote in saying they were going to cancel their...

they weren't going to pay their subscription to the BBC.

For Boty, art had the power not only to tear down the establishment,

but also to transform society.

As the '60s began, a woman's fate was still marriage,

motherhood and domesticity...

and it was a future that Boty refused to accept.

# Well, I insist that everybody twist!

# Come on everybody Let's twist, hey! #

A decade before mainstream feminism,

Pauline Boty had a mission.

To challenge a sexist society and its confining gender stereotypes.

# Round and round and you lift your leg up and down

# And you twist around the clock Around the clock! #

A revolution is on the way and all over the country,

young girls are sprouting, shouting and shaking.

And if they terrify you, they mean to,

and they're beginning to impress the world.

Pauline Boty set out to reinvent the kind of woman one could be.

And I think that's really significant.

She was trying to change the rules.

A lot of the women pop artists were very good looking,

and they were so trapped by how they looked, they were never allowed

to escape from being beautiful young women,

so they used pop to explore it.

In Boty's early paintings, women are often glamorous, beautiful,

sexually alluring...

but they're something else, too.

Fantasies dreamt up by Hollywood and the media.

# I want to be loved by you Just you and nobody else but you. #

Pauline Boty very much identified with Marilyn Monroe.

This kind of highly sexual, yet vulnerable and interesting woman.

It's not that kind of cool, detached image that you get

in the screen prints of Warhol.

It's this empathetic, involved position of the fan.

So, you feel this is almost articulating that emotional,

psychological thing that happens when a fan looks at an icon,

and there it is, a black and white dead image,

but you bring something to it

and create something that feels much more alive.

Exactly, and I think that's what Pauline Boty captures

in the way that she uses paint,

whilst also referencing black and white PR imagery.

Marilyn's death in 1962 devastated Boty,

inspiring her elegy, Colour Her Gone.

She believed that Marilyn had been betrayed by men,

who were unable to see her intelligence

through her dazzling sex appeal.

Boty was determined be taken seriously,

while also revelling in her glamour, and simply having fun.

# On the good ship, lollipop... #

In 1962, Boty started auditioning for films

and performing in plays, all the while continuing to paint.

# ..On the good ship Lollipop! #

-Hello.

-Hello, Natalie, I'm Alistair. It's a beautiful old house.

'Natalie Gibson met Boty in her first week at the Royal College of Art,

'and they became close friends immediately.'

'She witnessed Boty trying to make it as starlet AND artist.'

That's a very glamorous picture.

-This looks like a proper press photograph.

-I think it is.

I mean, looking at these she seems like somebody who was blessed

with a great deal of charisma?

Absolutely. She was such a vivacious girl.

I mean, there wasn't anything she couldn't do really.

She was just a kind of force.

Well, this was something where people were choosing

their ideal girl, and David Frost chose Pauline.

"'I like women who can do things,'

"said David as we queued for tea in the BBC canteen.

"'You know, a really swinging bird.

"'It's important she should look sexy,

"'but she must have the other thing as well.

"'She must look as though she could become Minister of Pensions.'"

I think perhaps he thought she had an intellect, or she was clever,

and well read and bright, as well as being sexy.

Boty was determined to change the status quo.

And to her, sexual liberation was the key.

Poor retiring English female, so unsure of their sexuality,

their femininity.

Your men are the ones who talk, who act, who do.

You're only their wives, a nondescript appendage,

a second-class citizen.

For Pauline Boty, women would only be equals

when they could express their sexuality as freely as men.

And she thought that time was fast approaching.

# Five, four, three, two, one! #

The TV show Ready Steady Go! defined a generation

with its catchy theme tune.

# Five, four, three, two, one! #

Boty danced in its studio,

and for her, the show seemed to symbolise

the sexual possibility and freedom of the times.

This painting is about the pleasures of dancing to pop music for women,

but also sexual anticipation.

The rose was very much Pauline's iconography

for female sexual desire and sensuality.

-You're wearing one today.

-And I'm wearing one in honour of her today.

But, when we look more closely, it's over-painted with flesh tones,

it's wild and hair-like and perhaps these are legs each side.

It is very suggestive of female genitalia,

some things about the lived, embodied experience

of sexual arousal for a woman.

A sexual libertarian, a feminist ahead of her time...

so, why on earth did Boty portray herself like this?

I mean, in this case she's completely starkers.

She always posed with her paintings...

when most of the women at that time posed with their work,

they would be in black clothes, black slacks, black top.

Very androgynous.

They hid the fact that they were women,

and what Pauline wanted to do was to absolutely smash that open, saying,

"No, I'm a sexually proactive being, just like men, and if I am naked

"with my painting there is no way you can avoid the fact

"this is a woman."

It was a really transgressive and brave thing to do,

but it didn't work.

Boty began to lose control of her image.

She appeared in her underwear without her paintings at all

in publications like Tit-Bits, a notorious soft-porn mag.

The art director at Tit-Bits sliced off the paintings,

so that all you've got left is the pretty girl,

for the delectation of the Tit-Bits' male audience.

So, you're saying she never sanctioned her photographs

-appearing in a magazine like this.

-No.

But it was too late.

Boty's image as a sexy, scantily clad starlet,

began to overshadow her reputation as an artist.

She vented her frustrations in this painting of cult writer

Derek Marlowe, a heart-throb equally celebrated for his brains.

It's a very seductive, attractive portrayal.

This is an individuated man, as he's carefully painted photorealist.

And then above are the unknown ladies.

They're unknown they're trying to be known,

they all look the same, they've got the same make-up,

they're straining for visibility

within what is possible in that world at the time.

These seem, to me, to be an expression of despair

at having to present yourself in a certain way that

we see around here in the '60s in the media, and it's a way that,

if you're a man, she's saying, you can get away with it.

Yep, and I think that's what depressed her.

The last couple of years of her life,

she got very depressed, actually.

And she found it very difficult to be heard and seen as an artist.

In 1965, Boty's luck seemed to change.

She was overjoyed when she fell pregnant.

But a routine X-ray revealed devastating news.

She had cancer.

To protect her unborn child,

she refused the treatment that could have saved her life.

She told me she thought it would take about ten years off her life.

But that she'd be better, you know.

She'd get out of there.

The last time I went to see her, I dragged Peter Blake along

cos he hadn't seen her,

and, um...

it was too late.

Boty died on July 1st, 1966, leaving behind a 5-month-old baby.

She was 28.

As soon as Pauline died, her work disappeared.

She had a three-year life of making pop paintings, basically...

and after that, the work totally disappeared.

She was this...

troubling memory

of something extraordinary in the back of my mind.

In 1993, art historian David Mellor was planning

an exhibition of British pop art.

He had a hunch that Boty's paintings were worth including.

If these things existed, where the hell had they gone to? Nobody knew.

COW MOOS

But somebody did know.

Not in the heart of London's art scene, but in a farm in Kent.

Bridget Boty was married to Pauline's brother, a farmer.

They didn't come to light until the day

that we were clearing out the house.

And I said to Arthur, "We can't put those paintings in the tip."

What Arthur, your husband, wanted to just throw away his sister's...?

No, it was a question of finding a space for them, wasn't it?

And so we slung it into the horse box

and just slung it into the mess room when we got back...

it was the only dry place we could find.

And that's where it stayed.

A chance tip-off led David Mellor to the Botys' farm.

He was determined to recover the works,

and have them seen by the public.

So, you're telling me that this is the place.

Yes, in 1992 I came here with Pauline's daughter.

What, here to the loo?

To the loo... It wasn't a loo then!

And looking here now, you know there's a...

there's a plastic sack of potatoes,

there's loads of bits and pieces, and the thing I find extraordinary,

it's almost like, if you're looking for an image of women artists

from the '60s being ignored, we're standing within it.

It could have been a lot of firewood stacked up, but it wasn't,

it was this thing that was a mass of massive cultural importance,

because suddenly...

a kind of whole history of English pop was different.

She's not the only woman pop artist

to be marginalised from the story of pop.

There were a wide range of women who did make names for themselves

at the time, but have been variously marginalised or excluded,

and the low watermark was achieved in 1991,

when the Royal Academy of Art had a huge retrospective of pop,

where one out of 202 pop works was by a woman.

If British Pop art has a hierarchy, then this man is at the top.

Sir Peter Blake.

In 1967, one of his most famous images would rebrand

a mop top boy band into a group of serious artists...

the Beatles.

The Sergeant Pepper album cover,

a compendium of the Beatles' cultural heroes,

was a crucial part of the concept.

# But they're guaranteed to raise a smile

# So may I introduce to you... #

Peter Blake went on to find fame

as one of the founding fathers of pop art.

But, he didn't work alone.

And actually, the Sergeant Pepper record cover

was a collaboration, and today,

the other artist who created this is practically unknown.

Until their divorce in 1981, Jann Howarth

was one half of a pop art power couple, along with Peter Blake.

To find her, I've flown 5,000 miles to the mountains of Provo, Utah,

where Haworth now lives.

This is the most magical house I've ever seen!

The eye is drawn somewhat to the enormous moose head

above your fireplace.

I have a vision on you on the top of a mountain with a gun...

killing this big creature.

No, you might have a vision of me painting it blue.

And, of course, I can't help but noticing this.

This is what many people don't know you for...

SHE LAUGHS

..but should.

Staged by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. So, there it is.

-Yeah, there it is.

-Not quite black and white...black and red.

This may look like a collage, but really, it's a photo.

The figures were huge... life-size cut outs,

dummies and sculptures, creating an enormous 3D film set.

Even the lettering was made of real flowers.

The Beatles just posed in the middle.

The thing about this is that it's got quite a contentious

-authorship history, really.

-Yeah, it does.

To set the record straight from your point of view -

which bits of this did you create?

Well, the concept of the set comes straight out of what

I was doing at the time, I was doing tableaux.

That overarching concept of making it life size.

And the lettering is mine.

The crowd concept is very much Peter.

Sergeant Pepper only earned them 200 quid,

but it did win them a Grammy.

It's now a little worse for wear.

Jann, what has happened? This is...

Children have happened.

They used it in their little Wendy house outside,

and that's the dog... the dog chewed that.

And this, once upon a time, was a gramophone horn up here was it?

-Yes.

-So, this is a kind of metaphor really for your outlook?

-Absolutely.

It's a two fingers up at a certain system.

Well, it's like a piece of iconoclastic art.

Yeah...bash it up, put it an old bag,

leave it out in the rain... it's wonderful.

In 1962, Haworth arrived at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

She didn't exactly receive a warm welcome.

I said to one of the tutors, "Do you need to see a portfolio of my work?"

and he said, "Oh, well, no, we don't really need to see portfolios

"of the women students... we just need to see their photograph

"because they're here to keep the boys happy."

-No way!

-I promise you, not a word of a lie.

At the Slade, for sure, there was this kind of separation,

that somehow the male students knew about paint, and they would do this

and say, "Well, men just know about paint, you know, women don't."

Haworth did know about something.

She'd been sewing since she was eight.

-We're going to make a doughnut.

-What sort of doughnut is this going to be?

This is a superhero doughnut.

A skill so historically tied to women,

it wasn't thought of as art.

I don't quite understand how it can go inside-out.

-There you are.

-So, now we stuff it, do we?

-Yeah, we do.

-I'm a doughnut natural. Is that what you're saying?

-I am.

She knew in this field at least, she could outdo the men.

-I don't get what you're doing at all.

-So, you pull there.

So, you just pull out like this all the way...pull it tight?

Pull it tight.

This is harder than it looks.

Haworth had her breakthrough on the bus.

There were tulips for sale and I so wanted to have them,

and I thought, "Cloth, I could make them out of cloth."

And then it was just BANG!

Because you thought, OK, gloves - that's a flower.

And, OK, zips - that's a snapdragon.

It just was like a dam burst of dreams because it was

something that I really understood and I knew the male students didn't.

There was a shift going on in British sculpture

and she's part of that,

and I think she kind of gets neglected out of that story.

Think of the history of sculpture in general,

she's one of the originators of doing soft sculpture.

So, I think that's really significant.

Traditional sculpture was cold, rigid, and on a plinth.

Haworth's sculpture was warm, yielding, and homely.

It was a mischievous challenge to a time-honoured way of making art.

At the Slade, where Haworth was taught by some of the biggest names

in modern art, it caused a stir.

One of her tutors was Eduardo Paolozzi.

When I showed Paolozzi, he said, "You should cast it in bronze."

And I had the presence of mind to say to him, "I've cast it in cloth."

Haworth's big break came in 1963, when her work was showcased

at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

She's recreated part of that exhibition here,

in the Brigham Young University Museum in Provo.

I love this guy, he's so great!

He's like your sort of... rather gruff guard dog.

-Would you like to adjust his tongue?

-Can I touch his tongue?

Yeah, I think it's one of the things...

Look, the tongue comes out!

Indeed, the tongue does come out.

Cloth doesn't last. It's fragile, it degrades.

It was the perfect symbol for human frailty.

That whole interest in the body and how the body is soft

and sags and responds to gravity,

it's more like what the potential of those materials can do.

That's why soft sculpture's important.

The idea really was that older people are sort of trapped

in a chair or immobile.

The old become a piece of furniture perhaps.

I was trying to make the idea of wrinkles be not an awful thing,

but something that was sort of full of colour,

and livelihood, and memory.

With her stitched grannies and cloth objects,

Haworth had discovered a new direction for sculpture.

We can still see her influence today.

With Tracey Emin you have, you know, sewing.

Sarah Lucas, you know, her body parts that are sewn together with

stockings and things like that.

There's a generation that takes the sewing and incorporates it

into fine art and that's why Jann's important,

she's the beginning of that, that still has lineage.

Yet, unbeknown to Haworth, on the other side of the Atlantic,

another artist was starting to make soft sculptures of his own.

Claes Oldenburg got his wife to sew the giant hamburgers

that helped elevate him to the pop art pantheon.

Today, it's Oldenburg, not Haworth,

who's known as the pioneer of soft sculpture.

This wasn't always the case.

From the mid-'60s, Haworth's work received international acclaim.

It caught the eye of Robert Fraser,

swinging London's most important art dealer.

It was only Bridget Riley and I, and Yoko Ono,

who were part of the gallery as females,

but that wasn't bad company to be in.

It's fantastic company.

-You were having a great moment in the '60s.

-Yeah.

But, Haworth's moment didn't last.

# Happy Birthday, dear Peter... #

In the 1970s, she moved to the country to raise a family.

Away from the London art scene,

Blake's reputation continued to grow, but Haworth's began to fade.

I felt I could do it all. I felt I could be an artist,

take care of my daughter, and do all the cooking,

and shopping and cleaning, all of that stuff.

And I was willing to take that position at that time.

I mean, now, I think I was exceptionally stupid in that regard,

and made an exceptionally good decision in terms of my children.

You know, the making of a mind is...it is...

it surpasses the making of an art object.

People are more important than art.

Pop art might have started in Britain, but it took off in America.

At the start of the '60s, there was no place on earth

more dazzling than New York City.

I think there's something really thrilling about approaching New York

like this because you see the city erupting out of the water

like this great, gleaming metropolis of the future.

And it helps to give you a sense, for me, anyway, of how excited

the pop artists of the '60s must have been just by capitalism, generally.

They wanted to incorporate the everyday reality

they found in the city into their art.

For millions of Americans, the shiny reality of advertising

belied the drudgery of office work and commuting.

And this was the world explored in the paintings of this woman.

Idelle Weber.

-Hi. Yeah, hello.

-Hi.

-Should I open this up?

-That would be a good idea.

-Really good to meet you.

-Nice to meet you.

It's pretty cool having an elevator

-that goes straight into your apartment...

-If it works.

-Oh, right. Convenient if it does.

-But, it doesn't always...

-Ah, Mad Men.

-Yeah, Mad Men, right.

Do you yourself see similarities between your paintings

and the Mad Men title sequence?

-Oh, no question, no question.

-How do you feel?

What am I going to do, you know? Scream? Sue them?

Mad Men's stark, stylish silhouettes won the show an Emmy in 2008.

Idelle Weber pioneered the look 50 years earlier.

It all began in 1956 with her first visit to New York City.

Aged 24, Weber was being featured in an exhibition

at the Museum of Modern Art.

-This is your first exhibition.

-Yeah.

It must have been validation for you as a young artist.

Oh, my God, I was thrilled.

She didn't go to the opening alone.

So, this is you and Julian.

Yeah. He was very impressed

by the fact that I was in the Museum of Modern Art.

I said that's what he married me for...fame and fortune.

This was your future husband?

Yeah, I knew almost immediately, I walked

up the steps to that place and I just went "Oh, my God."

I could... It was really something.

I just thought, "I've never met anyone like this, ever."

The night before I went, he said,

"Hey, let's go back and get married."

And I waited two seconds and said, "Sure."

'Through her marriage, Weber would see a world that transformed

'the way she made art.'

-So, this is your working space, this is your studio.

-Yeah.

God, look, so this is a reproduction of the munchkins you did,

-and you've got silhouettes everywhere.

-Yeah.

This looks like Prince Charles.

Well, it does a little bit, doesn't it? This, actually, is my husband.

I took a picture of him and he posed.

-He's very dapper.

-He was.

A corporate lawyer,

Julian worked amid the gleaming new architecture of Manhattan.

Weber would meet him after work.

The glass-fronted skyscrapers captured her imagination.

And what she saw inside them would become her subject.

Through the windows of the Lever building, Weber saw the silhouettes

of workers, who, like her husband toiled late into the night.

There's such a big element of repetition.

And, like, if you look up here, this is like it's the same guy.

-It is, it is.

-Are you sort of saying that there's something supremely

boring about corporate life?

Well, I think there was.

Whether it was in an office building or whether it was on the farm,

it's routine things that happen and you know about them.

But not everyone stops to see that or realises it.

It also feels, if there's a kind of bigger message here, right,

maybe what strikes me is that this is about society as this big,

quite oppressive machine, like this grid system stamping

itself on people and turning them into these kinds of stereotypes.

Few were more stereotyped than the women.

In Weber's vision, they're squeezed into corners.

Weber simply painted what she saw.

Looking around your work, it looks like women had various roles,

they could be secretaries, they could be naked, they could be brides.

But, Weber was determined to become a painter.

In the first years of her career,

she came across another young artist.

His name was Andy Warhol.

I thought he was very sweet, a crazy guy. He was terrific.

And I liked his work, I thought he really did some interesting stuff.

Although I was in a contest with him...

a drawing contest.

And I got second place, Warhol got first place.

-That must have been annoying.

-Well, it was.

As young artists, Weber and Warhol were desperate for a break.

Finding a gallery was essential.

I had my portfolio and I went to various galleries hoping

they would show some of the work.

And I went to Stable Gallery, which was a wonderful gallery at the time.

And the woman who ran it was quite intelligent, I think.

-This is Eleanor Ward.

-Yeah.

And she popped up... "We don't show women."

-Did she explain her reason when she said that?

-No.

She just said, "We don't show women," that was it?

Yeah, and the worst part of all in that rejection and others is,

I couldn't argue. When it comes to acquiring,

they will always take the male picture,

even if it was exactly the same.

Because you don't get as much for female stuff.

And they just didn't have the cache that the men's stuff had.

Sure enough, a couple of months later,

the Stable Gallery gave a young male artist his first break.

Weber's rival, Andy Warhol.

When Weber made her best known work,

Munchkins, Warhol popped in to see it.

And he's looking at it, he's looking at it, he's looking at it.

And he said, "You know, Idelle, there are rollers.

"You know these new rollers that are out?

"All you have to do is cut squares in them and you can go really fast."

You know I was doing them one by one by one...

and he said, "You know, that would make them look the same."

And I said, "No." And he said, "Well, what's the problem?"

And I said, "Nuance, Andy, nuance."

Cos those squares were all done by hand.

But he was so funny, he was trying to help me.

# Girls were made

# To take care of boys... #

It's hard to know if the male artists truly saw the women as equals.

Lichtenstein's most famous paintings were inspired by comic books,

and they satirise rigid gender stereotypes.

At least I hope they do.

Because at face value, his feeble women could seem rather misogynistic.

I'm heading to meet somebody that I hope

is really going to shed some light on the whole pop scene.

Because back in the '60s, she was an artist in her own right.

The thing is, nobody really remembers that now.

Instead, she's kind of known as a consort to one of pop art's big five,

because for several years, she was the girlfriend of Roy Lichtenstein.

Today, Letty Lou Eisenhauer is a student counsellor

at a college in New York City.

In the '60s, she lived with Lichtenstein

during the crucial period when he shot to fame.

I brought you something.

-Did you?

-Yes, I thought you would like this.

Ah, comics!

These are some of the ones that he cut up.

Seriously, these are the sources? Yes, Men Of War!

He did a whole series based on Men Of War...All-American Men Of War.

There are ones you can see that he's cut out...

-Look at this.

-Yeah, there. He cut out whatever that thing was.

I didn't realise he would use one comic so intensively.

Well, there...

he liked certain comics, that was, you know, very clear.

There were certain ones that he was much more attached to.

During their relationship,

Eisenhauer witnessed the pop movement taking flight.

Although an artist herself, she wasn't considered an equal.

There was a bar that the artists all went to from the pop period,

and I remember once Claes and Tom Wesselmann and you know,

a whole group of male artists, standing in a little,

tight-knit group, chatting and talking about art.

And I remember feeling like this little kid running around

the outside going, "Hey, pay attention, whoo!

"Hey, I'm here too, whoo!"

Women, you know, we were there, but we were there either as helpers

and/or maybe as objects.

Eisenhauer became known as a performance artist,

and regularly staged experimental happenings.

Sometimes, without her clothes...

-Who is this?

-That's me.

-Is it you? Amazing.

-What the hell's going on? You're covered in cream?

-Whipped cream.

And then, of course, the piece was called Lick, it's the obvious...

People did genuinely come and lick the cream off?

Well, nobody had the guts to get up and come lick me.

-Really?

-No.

'Whether people licked her or not,

'Roy Lichtenstein hated his girlfriend's nude performances.

'But Eisenhauer had a plan to keep him happy.'

That's so weird! I have to say,

this feels so surreal. I was not expecting this, at all.

This was to accommodate Roy, who didn't want me to go out

and be naked any more in public.

What, so he accepted this?

Cos this is totally like above... You know, this is respectable(!)

-SHE LAUGHS

-Right! I mean, it's ridiculous.

He may have been a prude,

but Lichtenstein did encourage Eisenhauer's pop paintings.

Today, they've all been lost,

and this is one of the few press clippings she owns.

Her painting isn't even in the foreground.

Why did you stop making work like that?

I guess because I didn't get very much response to it, you know,

and probably that was the case for most women.

I think that the art world has traditionally been a male world.

I would want to take a survey of all the gallery owners...

you know, and find out who were they showing?

What were they showing at this period of time?

In 1960, the clique of dealers and art critics that ruled

the New York art market was joined by a new gallery, PACE.

Unusually, in its 1964 pop art show, The International Girlie Exhibit,

almost half the works were by women.

One of them was Rosalyn Drexler, who today is best known as a writer.

"She had no hair below the roundness of her stomach."

It's an intriguing line.

Submissions Of A Female Wrestler is a riveting read.

The thing I find amazing about this book isn't so much

that Rosalyn Drexler wrote it,

it's that she based it on first-hand experience

because in the early '50s she toured the country as a wrestler herself.

Professionally, she was known as Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire.

The 1950s saw a wrestling boom,

with flocks of women trying their luck in the ring.

Rosalyn Drexler was one of them, a young housewife, who, in 1950,

left her husband and daughter for three months on the road.

Life as a wrestler took her south.

Families, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents,

they all loved it.

Because it was good against evil.

You know, it's a basic story.

Did you enjoy it?

No. I hated it.

# Oh, Lord... Oh, Lord... #

Away from New York, Drexler encountered

a different side of America.

One that was brutal and racist.

It was a world apart from anything I had known.

The big card,

the advertisement card,

on the card it said, "Special section for coloured folk."

I said, "Special section?"

And then the water fountains, white only, the toilets, white only.

I mean, all...I said, "What is this, what is happening?

I don't want to be here." And I left.

Drexler returned to her family,

but the ghosts of what she'd seen stayed with her.

By the mid '60s, her dark insights into America

would produce some of the most unsettling paintings in pop.

What's so surprising is that she never went to art school.

I never learned to draw or paint, any of that stuff.

I had to find a way to do what I wanted to do.

And that's why I turned to the media using photographs and posters.

Drexler took the photographs and posters

and painted directly on top of them.

What started as necessity evolved into a distinctive style all her own.

You're burying the image. It's like the undead.

I suppose...my work is like the undead...buried!

Drawing upon the torrent of commercial imagery,

Drexler created her own vision of the world,

painting not media sensation,

but psychological depth.

This is a really creepy image involving Marilyn Monroe

with some man skulking behind.

Yes. It's not a man skulking behind, it's her inner fear of...

of being pursued by death.

Marilyn had obsessive compulsive disorder, and was terrified of dying.

This photograph shows the aftermath of a fatal car crash

on the estate of Arthur Miller.

Marilyn became hysterical

and started to run, her security guard in hot pursuit.

You've seen something here which is much deeper and darker

than perhaps most people would spot, because looking at her,

she doesn't look...she looks like she's trying to move away

and she's moving quickly, but it doesn't look so apocalyptic.

But she was running because it was apocalyptic.

Nobody else cares. They all think, "Oh, it's great, Marilyn's running."

The darkness Drexler saw in the media reflected the times.

Civil unrest, violence and political uncertainty.

Drexler's painting, Is It True What They Say About Dixie?

is named after a song about the beauty of the South.

# Is it true what they say about Dixie?

# Does the sun really shine all the time?

# Do the sweet magnolias blossom at everybody's door

# Do the folks keep eating possum till they can't eat no more? #

The painting's title is ironic.

It shows white supremacist, Eugene Bull Connor,

police chief of Birmingham, Alabama,

who during the Civil Rights era became a symbol of racism.

He had a very bad reputation, evil man,

and was responsible for a lot of deaths and attacks on Black people.

Very hateful human being.

The thing I love about this is that the mob has become this unified mass

-because the black is linking everything.

-Yes, yes.

So it's like this creature with all these different limbs

-and it's very intimidating.

-Yes, it is intimidating, it...

Just their being there is intimidating.

Drexler's paintings were included in important early pop art shows.

In the 1964 exhibition here at PACE Gallery,

she held her own with the men.

This is a list of some of the artists who exhibited there.

-You've got people like Lichtenstein, right?

-Yes.

-Big names, Tom Wesselmann.

-Right.

Andy Warhol.

These are the big male artists,

and then Rosalyn Drexler, one, two, three, four, five, six works.

The men in the show would soon become central figures

in the emerging pop art canon.

But Drexler was excluded.

I wanted to ask you about how you felt at the time

when this was happening.

You're asking me to understand what I felt 50 years ago?

That's exactly what I'm asking.

Who the hell knows?

I can't go back and say put me in the hierarchy.

Too late now.

According to critics and curators, Drexler's paintings

were too passionate, too painterly to be pop.

By the late '60s, a strict set of rules was in place,

that defined what was pop art and what was not.

I think it came from the galleries and the critics in tandem.

I think that they're trying to define a style in order to

kind of get leverage, in order to promote it into the market place.

Artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein wanted to create art

so flat and detached, that it could have been made,

not by a hand, but by a machine.

Warhol gets that image and then makes a silk screen

and then replicates that silk screen.

There's...there's five stages away from Marilyn...

and that removal process is a chilling process,

it's not expressionistic, it's analytic.

And they're trying to remove that hand and trying

to remove the emotion. OK, so that defines pop art a certain way.

Full of visible brushstrokes,

Drexler's works are too obviously hand painted to count as pure pop.

For other female artists, it was a similar story.

They don't fit neatly and tightly

into a circumscribed definition of the movement.

And when that happens, and critics and curators

can't neatly place them in those categories,

they would just rather not deal with them.

Drexler's recent paintings are held in storage.

This is the first time she has seen her later works

on the walls of a gallery.

You said before you were looking at the '60s work

and you felt really proud.

How do you feel when you look at these paintings?

Well, I'm so glad I did them. I'm very happy.

I feel that they're successful or I would have destroyed them.

I think there's a link between your work

and then that sort of darker side of Warhol.

There's a whole strand of pop which is...which is scathing,

critical, strong, quite stern about the world that those artists

see around them, and I feel that your work fits into that.

Thank you. Thank you.

-To be honest...

-Yes?

I'm just really thrilled to have met you today and to have seen

the paintings in this situation, in this gallery, like a private view.

It's been really special for me, so thank you.

Thank you very much. Then I shouldn't go home and kill myself.

Please don't.

It's quite easy to find pop art slightly...inane sometimes,

maybe a bit flat, a bit superficial, but her art isn't superficial at all

because she's looking at America, she's finding fault with it,

there's a moral centre to it, which is compelling

because it feels authentic and real.

I was really quite...in awe of her at the end, actually.

I felt like I'd met someone who was wise.

A really great artist.

Work by female pop artists hasn't been easy to find.

At New York's Museum of Modern Art, there's a notable exception.

The artist known as Marisol was famed for her exotic beauty

and sophistication.

Born in Paris to Venezuelan parents, she arrived in New York City in 1950.

Six years later, when she was still only 25,

Marisol's early sculptures were shown here

alongside work by Picasso, Duchamp, Johns, and Rauschenberg.

In 1963, she was back in MoMA's first major pop art show.

Then, her work filled an entire room.

Today, MoMA owns 28 of her works, but only two are on display.

I'm quite excited because I've never actually seen any works

by Marisol for real.

This is the first time I've seen one of her sculptures,

and this is a piece from 1962 called Love.

And it's a Coke bottle being shoved into

a plaster cast of a woman's face, Marisol's own.

And it's quite a brutal piece, really.

Marisol is making a joke about the fact that this consumerist culture,

this capitalist abundance, is being, literally in this case,

shoved down our throats.

It's a piece of satire, and it works effectively

because it's both disturbing,

but also weirdly, and don't judge me for saying this,

but slightly amusing.

Marisol is on show in the permanent collection,

sharing the space with pop art's chosen few.

But she's hardly the main attraction.

Everybody, they've got their phones out,

they're just interested in Marilyn by that pesky Andy Warhol.

I don't know, what's he got that she hasn't?

In the 1960s, it was a different story.

Marisol was the only female artist who could command

the same kind of prices as the men.

Her work was playful...

..witty.

It satirised politicians...

celebrities...

and society.

She made elaborate self-portraits and casts of her own face.

And people were desperate to know about the woman behind the mask.

But, Marisol was determined to remain a mystery.

She's constantly referred to as an enigma.

She's probably one of the hardest interviews

I've ever done in my life.

It was almost like pulling teeth to get her to talk.

When she was 11 years old, her mother committed suicide,

and she did not speak for a whole year.

She sort of had this pattern of not speaking

well into her 20s, and by the time she finally decides

to start speaking, she says

she doesn't think she has anything to say.

Marisol became known as the sphinx without a riddle,

and today she is as much a mystery as ever.

In her 80s, she hasn't been interviewed in years.

Her silence has always added to her glamorous allure.

And for me, this can't be an accident.

This is a Marisol interview from 1968.

You're such a marvellous observer of people.

Would you like to say a few words

on what is a background for this understanding of...

of subject matter?

Um...I can't explain it.

You can't explain it. Not that way?

It is a disaster, this interview.

It's...

It is painful to listen to this because

she refuses to say anything at all.

It must have been an act,

it must have been part of her persona.

We know she was very media savvy, she appeared in all of these reviews,

and all these profiles, she was controlling her image,

and this was another way of controlling that image.

And the person I think who learnt from this

and took it to the next level, if you like, was Andy Warhol,

because he must have seen the way Marisol behaved and then he, too,

imitated that flat deadpan delivery to the point where, in his own words,

he could come across like a machine.

So, this way of speaking, which I think Marisol arguably pioneered,

is something that became a central mode of behaviour, if you like,

for the most famous pop artist of them all.

So, why did you decide to paint the electric chair?

Uh...I don't know.

Andy Warhol picks Andy Warhol, that persona, from Marisol...

that's Marisol's influence. Andy Warhol wasn't that person.

He had to invent that, and that invention comes from Marisol.

Andy, do you think that pop art has sort of reached the point

-where it's becoming repetitious now?

-Uh, yes.

They were really very close friends, I think

they were very similar personalities.

Their silence, and then when they did talk,

the things that they did say were expressed in a way

to attract the most attention.

It's almost like she's a female version of him, in some senses.

I wouldn't argue with that.

She was important.

She was part of the fabric of New York City.

She was it. She was the "it" girl of pop art.

And like any "it" girl, Marisol made the news.

One person says, "A Latin Garbo."

She appeared in the pages of Harper's Bazaar, she was in Vogue...

There's this review, Brian O'Doherty, this is New York Times,

1964, and it's a review of her exhibition and it was a blockbuster.

It was a total knockout.

Apparently there were 2,000 or more people every single day

visiting the gallery, which is just unprecedented.

At this point, she was more famous than Andy Warhol.

Marisol's work was a hit with the critics,

but it was adored by the public.

I mean, there's this wonderful quote about the fact that everybody went,

including mothers with five children.

Her work was extremely accessible.

How does she compare to the greats of pop art, people like Lichtenstein

or Warhol or Wesselmann?

Well, if you want my personal opinion,

I actually like her better than Lichtenstein

and Wesselmann. I mean, I think she can hold her own with Andy Warhol.

So, what went wrong?

Her career heats up, she kind of has a little freak out.

She goes to Italy and lives there for about a year and a half.

How come?

She sort of felt like she was out of control,

she was having trouble sort of hanging on to her...you know,

figuring out who she was or what she was doing.

And when she comes back, she suffers as many other women artists do,

of having been female.

She still continued to make really strong important work

and yet, it's like she disappeared off the face of the earth.

She's not the only one.

Go to a pop show today...

..and the great legacy of the female artists is barely visible.

To me, it's an oversight we can no longer afford.

The artists I've encountered depicted a newly consumerist,

media-saturated world... the world in which we now live.

They asked questions about gender, politics and capitalism

that today seem more pertinent than ever.

If I'm honest, at the outset I did worry a little bit

that women pop artists may have been largely forgotten

because their work wasn't actually any good, but meeting them has been

a really powerful experience for me,

because I can now say with confidence that that simply wasn't the case.

I think it's time we started paying these artists the attention

they deserve because once their work is back in the frame,

the wider picture of pop art becomes that bit richer,

that bit more complex, and ultimately, much more exciting.

# You've been gone too long

# You've been gone too long

# Oh, you've been gone too long

# You've been gone

# Much too long. #