After being shut throughout November, Tate Britain opened with a bonzer of a show, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night, of beautiful, masterful portraits by the British painter.
They are images of black men, performing or at rest; women, floating in scenes of undefined domesticity; and children at play. Showing her work from the early 2000s to the present, the show amounts to a celebration of bodies and the artistry of conjuring them.
Yiadom-Boakye, who was born in London in 1977, studied at Falmouth College of Art, in rural and isolated Cornwall, and then at the Royal Academy of Arts. This is her most extensive show to date, following a number of smaller museums shows and a presentation at the Sharjah Biennial in 2015.
It reveals her skill at evoking a world that remains under-represented in art history: that of black subjects, at ease and in command. They are rendered in portrait-size works, a choice that formally conveys a sense of stature. The black male body is celebrated as: stretching at the barre, in the large-scale painting of ballet performers A Concentration (2018); seen in repose, as in Tie the Temptress to the Trojan (2016); or advancing with hand outstretched, in Diplomacy II (2009).
The subject's expressions are kindly, straightforward, at times supercilious. While the majority of her subjects are men, women figure as well, such as in the portrait of female insouciance, A Whistle in a Wish (2018), of a woman blowing smoke from a cigarette, or the painting of two black children on the beach, Condor and the Mole (2011), entranced by what creatures lie on the ground.
Yiadom-Boakye composes her characters from images that she collects – a devotion to fiction that upends the portrait genre. Rather than being a reflection of someone, these are images of people who do not exist in a particular time or place. Theatrical props deepen this sense of fiction, whether in the depictions of dancers or the fanciful props that her characters sometimes pose with.
The subject of The Matters (2016), for example, stares out at the viewer, refined, self-possessed, holding a luxuriantly painted owl, its brown and sandy feathers rippling downward. The man depicted in Six Birds in the Bush (2015) levels his gaze at the viewer, wearing a white T-shirt and a purple feather in his hat.
Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits have at times been read as pastiche, which seems both an attempt to theoretically rescue them from their unfashionable medium of oil painting, and as a lack of clarity around how – as an overwhelmingly white art world – to deal with Yiadom-Boakye’s decision to paint an entirely black cast of characters. (Yiadom-Boakye herself resists focusing on this element of her work.)
To call attention to the works' blackness is both celebratory and pigeonholing, particularly as this long-planned show appears at a moment of heightened racial sensitivity. The suite of works is about expressions, gestures, mannerisms, and gazes as much as it is about race. But there is also a huge significance to her as a black British woman stepping into the role of an Old Master, and whether that engulfs the coverage of her work is both beyond her control and might indeed miss the point.
Fiction seems a surer tack to take: the portraits create their characters ex nihilo, imagining facial expressions and the way they might carry themselves. I found myself wondering whether Yiadom-Boakye lives with her characters, tossing them about in her head at night, the way novelists do – particularly as the artist is also a writer, as her evocative titles intimate.
The absence of any particular identifiers of time, class, or location buttresses the formal timelessness of the portraits, allowing them to exist just as characters, not as representatives of a time or type of person.
And what people they are: smart, composed, clever, funny. I'd like to know the joke that's making the man smile in Black Allegiance to the Cunning (2018), perched on a stool above a reclining fox; I'd like to spend time with the nonchalant woman of A Whistle, watching the smoke curl out of her mouth. I'd smile at the camaraderie of the girls on the beach; I'd ready myself for the performance of the dancers in A Concentration. What a show for a world that has weathered an incredibly tough year: a show of people, separately and together, being great.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League with the Night is open till Sunday, May 9, 2021 at Tate Britain.
