Half a century after a sex scandal rocked the British political establishment and kickstarted the 1960s social revolution, academics are searching for a long-vanished but highly important painting created at the height of the 1963 Profumo affair by one of modern art's most extraordinary "lost" figures.

If found, the work – Scandal '63 by the British pop artist Pauline Boty – would not only solve the 50-year mystery over the fate of a painting held to be of exceptional importance: it would also, a growing body of art historians hope, help return its creator to her rightful place at the heart of the era's explosion of sexual and creative liberation, and bring to an end decades of "wilful and conscious" exclusion by the male-domi...