Les Partisans (The Partisans)

An enthralling tableau spanning two metres in width, Les Partisans is an important early work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. From layers of rich, tactile brushwork and velvety chiaroscuro, a group of figures emerges, bathed in exquisite tonal contrasts. Three men, dressed in dazzling white robes, look to their leader: a woman, who points the way out of the darkness towards the light in the distance. Painted in 2009, the work is closely related to Yiadom-Boakye’s celebrated three-part series Diplomacy, the first instalment of which features in her current retrospective at Tate Britain, London. Resembling photographs of political conventions, these works represent her earliest major group compositions, each featuring a single woman amid a gathering of men. Significantly, this was the first time the artist had included both genders in her portraits: a strategy that continues to remain rare within her oeuvre. Here, binary oppositions—male and female, illumination and shadow—are eloquently intertwined. The three men, like the three magi, assume the role of disciples; the woman, flickering with Yiadom-Boakye’s own likeness, becomes the prophet. A new dawn breaks just beyond the picture plane, its light seeping into her world.

In 2009, Yiadom-Boakye was poised on the brink of acclaim. The following year would see her first major institutional show open at the Studio Museum, Harlem, followed by her landmark presentation at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, which earnt her a nomination for the 2013 Turner Prize. Les Partisans, along with the Diplomacy series, captured many of the ideas that have since come to form the matrix of her practice. Plucked largely from her imagination, though frequently informed by art history and other external sources, Yiadom-Boakye’s fictional characters play out enigmatic scenarios. Though she has claimed that her depiction of black figures is not intended to be explicitly political, she is nonetheless conscious that they frequently spark politicised narratives. For all their apparent timelessness, the works’ references to ‘partisans’ and ‘diplomats’ prompts the viewer to think about the diaspora and the role of black leaders in global history: the curator Okwui Enwezor has compared the series to Marion Kaplan’s photographs of East African leaders at a summit in 1967. In Les Partisans, such implications work in poetic counterpart with the painting’s nod to Western religious iconography: an epiphany of some description has occurred, but its precise nature—spiritual, political, cultural—is left entirely to the viewer’s imagination.

The work’s political overtones also extend to its focus on a female leader. As well as playing with art-historical settings and genres in which black figures were typically not represented, Yiadom-Boakye also considers scenarios from which women have been largely absent. As Enwezor writes, the singular presence of a female protagonist in each of these large-scale group portraits serves to disrupt ‘the all-male club of leaders. The insertion of the female character into the field of power suggests a mild critique of representations of postcolonial heroism in which women play no role’ (O. Enwezor, ‘The Subversions of Realism’, in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations, exh. cat. Studio Museum of Harlem, New York 2010, p. 30). In both Les Partisans and the Diplomacy series, the woman in question seems to have been cut and spliced from another realm, her garments out of kilter with those of her companions, and her form seemingly bathed in an otherworldly light. That light—consciously imported from the paintings of Goya, Manet, Ingres and other patriarchs of the Western canon—is endowed with new meaning. It is no longer a conduit to the past, but a means of illuminating marginalised narratives, and of showing alternative ways forward.