Reviews for The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters

The average rating for The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-05-29 00:00:00 Terrence Richards I was just down in Delray Beach, Florida. While I was there I visited the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum, which is the former home of the late Solomon D. Spady, the most prominent African American educator and community leader in the city from the '20s through the '50s. They were showing an exhibit of a group of Florida landscape painters known as "the Highwaymen," whom I'd never heard of. I liked the show, so I bought this book, and read it over the course of the next few days. The Highwaymen were a group of young African American painters (25 men and one woman) in and around Ft. Pierce who produced approximately 50,000 to 200,000 landscape paintings from the '50s through the '70s. The name "Highwaymen" wasn't given to them until 1994, when art aficionado Jim Fitch coined the term. While potentially pejorative because of the association with highway robbery, the name is appropriate, since the artists drove up and down Florida's coast to sell their paintings, which they produced quickly, in great numbers, and primarily to make money. They got their start when a young, self-taught black artist named Harold Newton was taken under the wing of a successful white Florida landscape artist named A.E. "Beanie" Backus. Other young black painters from Ft. Pierce followed in Newton's footsteps, most notably Alfred Hair, whose dream was to be a millionaire by the time he was 35. Although he fell short of his goal (he was murdered at the age of 29), Hair did fulfill his dream of owning a Cadillac and supporting his wife and children with the money he made selling his paintings, most of which he produced in less than an hour each. Hair is fondly remembered by most of the people interviewed for the book as a charismatic and inspiring figure. The Highwaymen often painted in groups, and encouraged one another. While their art is the type one might see hanging in bank lobbies, over sofas in middle-income homes, and in motel rooms, appreciation for it has grown in recent years. Their paintings sold for around $50 when the oils were still drying, around $5 at garage sales in the '80s, and for more than $1,000 today, now that collectors have taken an interest in their work. Monroe's book is really wonderful. It's not overloaded with text or portentous analyses of their work. Monroe doesn't try to inflate their importance as artists. He places their work in its cultural context (he calls it "vernacular art") and talks about the many things that make it special. The bulk of the book is taken up by reproductions of Highwaymen art. There are 59 plates that showcase work by most of the artists identified as "Highwaymen," with a focus on the work of Newton and Hair. One of the interesting things about the Highwaymen is that they worked from memory and imagination. They didn't spend all day on-site, attempting to perfectly recreate the scene before them. They used brushes, palette knives, and fingers to quickly (and with the least amount of paint necessary) create vividly colored impressions of the Florida wilderness they'd grown up in. Their art has no visible political context--humans and buildings rarely appear in Highwaymen art (which is probably why the Highwaymen were able to find so many buyers for their art, as well as sell to white businesses and individuals in a volatile and desegregating South without any reports of violence or animosity), What their art does do, however, is invite the viewer to participate in a shared experience of wonder. Their depictions of Florida's natural beauty, its volatile coastal weather, and its unearthly sunsets and tricks of light are frequently stunning.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-26 00:00:00 Jesse Mcfarlane Some nice insight into the informal group of self-taught painters that hawked their hastily -painted Florida landscape paintings to travelers and local businesses.