Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

 Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
A Passion Like No Other (2012) 
Collection of Lonti Ebers  © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

NY Times: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's Subjects Are All in Her Head

“Going from the sense of trying to illustrate an idea, to allowing the paint to bring something to life, or thinking about painting as a language in itself — that was the major shift”

https://nyti.ms/3nqQO7c

Tate: Exhibition Guide

"I learned how to paint from looking at painting and I continue to learn from looking at painting. In that sense, history serves as a resource. But the bigger draw for me is the power that painting can wield across time.

"I work from scrapbooks, I work from images I collect, I work from life a little bit, I seek out the imagery I need. I take photos. All of that is then composed on the canvas. [This lets me] really think through the painting, to allow these to be paintings in the most physical sense, and build a language that didn’t feel as if I was trying to take something out of life and translate it into painting, but that actually allowed the paint to do the talking."

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/lynette-yiadom-boakye/exhibition-guide

Further Readings on Homosexuals, Holocaust and History

Unknown Photographer,
Prisoners in the Concentration Camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany (1938), 
US National Archive of Foreign Records

My reading to further explore this photo from Sachsenhausen continues (see also this post from August 2020 with earlier books). 

Who are these people? 

What was their experience before and after this photograph was taken? 

Have they told their own stories? 

How have others used this as part of their artistic process?

More Books

[These are listed in the order in which I read them, with the most recently read book first. "Read" is a relative term, for example, Homosexuelle Männer im KZ Sachsenhause is 378 pages of German. I used Google Translate to read the essay on Richard Grune. Perhaps I'll tackle more from that in the future. This book is completely on topic for the photo.]

Harlan Greene: The German Officer's Boy (2005) WorldCat

Stephen Koch: Hitler's Pawn, The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust (2019) WorldCat

Andreas Sternweiler and Joachim Müller, editors: Homosexuelle Männer im KZ Sachsenhausen / Homosexual Men in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (2000) WorldCat

Jurgen Lemke, editor: Gay voices from East Germany / Ganz Normal Anders (1991) WorldCat

Ken Setterington: Branded by the Pink Triangle (2013) WorldCat

Lannon Reed: Behold a Pale Horse, a novel of homosexuals in the Nazi holocaust (1985) WorldCat

Tom Stoppard: Leopoldstadt (2020) WorldCat

Martin Amis: Time's Arrow (1991) WorldCat

Marc David Baer: German, Jew, Muslim, Gay, The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus (2020) WorldCat

Judy Chicago: Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light (1993) WorldCat

Berel Lang: Primo Levi, The Matter of A Life (2013) WorldCat

Isabel Wilkerson: Caste (2020) WorldCat

[the earlier book list]

Thank You to Libraries

Several of these books were borrowed from the Chicago Public Library and the Gerber Hart Library and Archives.