Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give – a 1962 painting by British pop artist Pauline Boty – was sold for £1,310,500 at Christie’s in London this week. It was one of three works inspired by Marilyn Monroe, whose influence I’ve discussed here – and the highest price reached for the late artist’s work to date. Ahead of the sale, the Scottish author Ali Smith made a short film about Boty, who also featured in her 2016 novel, Autumn. 

In June 1962, Marilyn Monroe was sacked from the film Something’s Got to Give. The production had been plagued with false starts, delays and reshoots, the budget had spiralled out of control, and jumpy executives decided it was their leading lady who was to blame. LIFE magazine ran with the headline ‘They Fired Marilyn: Her Dip Lives On’ in reference to the actor’s notorious on-set swim in the nude, which had been captured by photographer Larry Schiller, giving the screwball comedy some welcome pre-publicity.

The British Pop artist Pauline Boty (1938-1966) commemorated the actor’s dismissal with Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give … The painting vividly depicts Monroe splashing about in the pool, surrounded by brilliant bursts of abstract shapes like fireworks on the Fourth of July. In the lower part of the picture is a small siren — a recurring mythological symbol in Boty’s work, which can be read here as an allusion to Monroe’s bewitching magnetism.

Like Monroe, the luminous Boty was also an actor, performing on stage with James Fox and appearing in the 1966 British hit comedy Alfie. She understood the vicarious nature of the profession and the eternal-seeming fabulousness of glamour. ‘I mean that’s a completely false thing,’ she said to the writer Nell Dunn, adding that ‘it’s very easy to get things out of proportion and really and truly if you think about it there are millions of other people who are much better than you anyway. And — well I think it can be very destructive.’

Around the time Boty completed Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give, Monroe was found dead from a drug overdose in her Hollywood home … Boty knew that Monroe would be deified for her glamour as well as her troubled private life, and was quicker to acknowledge it than Andy Warhol or Richard Hamilton.

Over the next few months, Boty painted two more elegies to Monroe that celebrated her beguiling spirit … When asked why Boty identified with Monroe so strongly, the actor Roddy Maude-Roxby — who had known her since her RCA days — remarked that the artist recognised the challenges Monroe had faced: ‘that she’s, like Pauline, someone who is seen by the world as very beautiful, and then exploited’.

Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give was exhibited at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in August 1962, and was gifted by the artist to a close friend two years later. It has remained in the same collection ever since.

With art, Boty found a certain detachment, which she welcomed. ‘If you’re acting, it’s you who they’re criticising,’ she once explained. ‘You know, your actual appearance, your walk, what you’re saying, everything. Whereas if you’re painting, it’s just a painting that you’ve done. It’s an object which is somehow set slightly apart from you now that you have done it.’

And in other news, the upcoming documentary, BOTY, is set to be screened for the first time at the Nevill Holt Festival in Market Harborough, Leicestershire on June 13th.