“She finally finds the open space. The artist has solved the problem of the story, of the history of the confined woman who has been robbed of everything but her genealogy, her history and her legend. Womanology.”
—Ángela Molina

Painted in 2010, Womanology forms part of a conceptual suite of works by acclaimed British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye that gesture towards an ongoing exploration of femininity, identity, and observation in her practice. The self-reflective nature of Womanology also speaks to Yiadom-Boakye’s position as an established female artist working within the long tradition of portraiture and figurative painting. It was a highlight of the eponymous exhibition from the esteemed collection of José Ramón Prieto at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao in 2021, showcasing a selection of works exclusively by women artists, and positioning Yiadom-Boakye as the leading figure at the very forefront of this contemporary pantheon alongside internationally acclaimed figures such as Marina Abramović, Louise Bourgeois, and Tracey Emin. 

A Dialogue with Tradition

 

Rendered in deft, broad strokes of subtle, earthy hues, the architecture of the composition in Womanology centres around a single female figure, comprising a pared-back sequence of effortless brushstrokes that distinguish her form from the muted surroundings. In the distance, two luminous figures traverse the horizon line, their presence creating a relative sense of pictorial space and depth. In this more liminal landscape, it is the central protagonist who grounds and guides us, a horizontal swathe of deep, rich blue pigment drawing the viewer eye’s inwards towards her face, the composition’s vanishing point framed by her light-coloured hood. Catching the line of her gaze, our eye is sent back out across the canvas towards the characters in the distance, an oscillation that dramatises the question of looking itself.
 

In contrast to the indistinct, tonal backdrops that were more typical of her early work, in this transitional composition, the figures are set within a spatial if somewhat ‘placeless’ environment. The visual logic here recalls the early implementation of linear perspective in Renaissance painting, aligning the artist with the history of figuration in the Western canon as in the early 15^th century, when pioneering artists such as Masaccio were striving to represent the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. Yiadom-Boakye’s subtle nod to the forefathers of single-point perspective is evident in the diminishing figures receding into the distance of the present work, coupled with the converging parallel lines of the landscape.
 

Imagined Figures in Ambiguous Worlds

“For Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character studies of people who don’t exist.”
—Zadie Smith

In the early workings of linear perspective, the directional pull of the guiding lines could be used to convey an underlying sense of continuous narrative, leading the viewer from one scene to the next. In Womanology, the ambiguity of the landscape and the identity of the figures resists any kind of literal interpretation. Instead, Yiadom-Boakye invites the viewer to contemplate and reconstruct the surrounding contextual narrative.  A writer as well as a painter, her canvases serve as intimate painterly fictions. Imagined scenarios, like film-stills extracted from a wider narrative, punctuate her artistic practice, fragments of storylines that lie just beyond our conceptual reach. In doing so, she confronts many of the traditional notions of the genre of portraiture; her subjects are not real-life sitters, but figments of her imagination. She says of her subjects, ‘although they are not real I think of them as people known to me. They are imbued with a power of their own; they have a resonance – something emphatic and other-worldly.’ⁱ It is this sense of the ‘other worldly’ in her paintings that lends them such a transcendental quality, instilled with a sense of familiarity that is undermined by the obscurity of their representation. The figures feel both intimate and unreachable, inviting a shared act of storytelling between the artist and her audience.
 

The influence of British portrait painter John Singer Sargent on Yiadom-Boakye's painting style is well documented, and is evidenced beautifully in the present work, both technically and conceptually. Take for example Singer Sargent's 1884 Madame X, arguably one of his most recognisable portraits and now held in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The portrait shows a single female figure, her head turned to the right, away from the viewer and gazing into the middle distance, drawing remarkable visual parallels with Womanology. Even the opulent, umber tones, subtle highlights and soft, painterly brushstrokes are reminiscent of Sargent's famous work. But what draws the most striking parallel here is the unknowability of the sitter, famously referred to as the anonymous 'Madame X'. American socialite and acquaintance of the artist in Paris, the subject was in fact Madame de Gautrot, her reputation so tarnished by the scandalous portrait that her name was relegated to the pages of history. Sensitive to his sitter’s need for some anonymity, Sargent himself requested that her name be withheld when the work was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Much like the figures populating Yiadom-Boakye’s canvases, this ambiguity enables viewers to reconstruct these stories for themselves.

 

“The testimonies of many female visual artists are also stories, paradigmatic tales that describe stories that other women would tell if they were able to express their excited fantasies in the roomier spaces provided by their own authorship.”
—Ángela Molina

The phrase Womanology appears elsewhere in Yiadom-Boakye’s practice, hinting at a recurring preoccupation in her practice. All female subjects, these works offer snapshots into the lives of fictional women, capturing fleeting insights into the intangible essence of womankind so transitory that they are impossible to capture with words. Painted in 2011 and included in Yiadom-Boakye’s first solo exhibition with Corvi-Mora titled Notes and Letters, Womanology 2 depicts a lone female figure immersed in lush, green marshlands, surveying a distant horizon. Meanwhile the 2014 Womanology 12, now held in the permanent collection at the National Museum of African Art, depicts a similarly anonymous subject, looking away from the viewer through a pair of binoculars, engaged once again in an act of looking for something beyond the physical limitations of the canvas. As the institution notes, ‘Womanology 12 seems to imply that there might be a Womanology 1-11, scenes that we may still have the opportunity to encounter. Yet Yiadom- Boakye has dropped us into the middle of a story for which we must imagine the past and future.’ⁱⁱ
 

Acknowledging, interrogating and adapting traditional notions of portraiture and figurative painting, Yiadom-Boakye’s imagined female figures — situated in open landscapes, untethered to specific settings or roles, and looking for something that lies beyond the delineated edges of the canvas — also demonstrate how the artist challenges entrenched representations of women more generally and redefines their place in art history. This is exemplified in Womanology which, coupled with its notable provenance and recent placement at the forefront of a group of leading contemporary female artists, marks this an exquisite example from this avenue of her practice.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Womanology was a highlight of the eponymous exhibition from the esteemed collection of José Ramón Prieto, showcasing works by internationally acclaimed women artists, at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao in 2021.
• Shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2013, Yiadom- Boakye has been the subject of major international solo exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and her critically celebrated exhibition Fly in League with the Night, hosted by Tate Britain in London, amongst others. She is one of the most technically accomplished and critically celebrated figurative artists of her generation.
• Examples of her work are held in important institutional collections internationally, including the Tate Collection in London and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yiadom-Boakye is currently the focus of a solo exhibition of new works with Corvi Mora Gallery in London.

 

 

 

ⁱ Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in Flow, exh. cat., The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2008, p. 103.

ⁱⁱ Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art, Womanology 12, label text (online).