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Searching... Archives and History | Reference book | HIST 758.1759 MON | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"For the first time, the real story behind the Highwaymen has emerged . . . a well-researched, lively, and comprehensive overview of the development and contribution of these African-American artists and their place in the history of Florida's popular culture."--Mallory McCane O'Connor, author of Lost Cities of the Ancient Southeast
The Highwaymen introduces a group of young black artists who painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in citrus groves and packing houses of 1950s Florida. As their story recaptures the imagination of Floridians and their paintings fetch ever-escalating prices, the legacy of their freshly conceived landscapes exerts a new and powerful influence on the popular conception of the Sunshine State.
While the value of Highwaymen paintings has soared in recent years, until now no authoritative account of the lives and work of these black Florida artists has existed. Emerging in the late 1950s, the Highwaymen created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida dream and peddled, by some estimates, 200,000 of them from the trunks of their cars.
Working with inexpensive materials, the Highwaymen produced an astonishing number of landscapes that depict a romanticized Florida--a faraway place of wind-swept palm trees, billowing cumulus clouds, wetlands, lakes, rivers, ocean, and setting sun. With paintings still wet, they loaded their cars and traveled the state's east coast, selling the images door-to-door and store-to-store, in restaurants, offices, courthouses, and bank lobbies.
Sometimes characterized as motel art, the work is a hybrid form of landscape painting, corrupting the classically influenced ideals of the Highwaymen's white mentor, A. E. "Bean" Backus. At first, the paintings sold like boom-time real estate. In succeeding decades, however, they were consigned to attics and garage sales. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as the work of American folk artists.
Gary Monroe tells the story behind the Highwaymen, a loose association of 25 men and 1 woman from the Ft. Pierce area--a fascinating mixture of individual talent, collective enterprise, and cultural heritage. He also offers a critical look at the paintings and the movement's development. Added to this are personal reminiscences by some of the artists, along with a gallery of 63 full-color reproductions of their paintings.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
The Highwaymen, by Gary Monroe, a documentary photographer with a longtime interest in "outsider" and vernacular art, is a culturally significant work. It is an authoritative account, with interviews of the autonomous young black painters of Florida in the 1950s. It is through the arts of this particular time and place that we learn to understand Florida as a metaphor for escape. As did the artists of the 19th-century Hudson River School, which was based on wide cultured currents of romantics, these artists celebrated nature over civilization. In this time of segregation in which a quality education was denied to African Americans, life as a painter allowed them to rise above social expectations and hard labor jobs in the citrus groves. This artistic style is sometimes characterized as motel art, bastardizing the canonical pictorial strategies of the Highwaymen's white mentor, A.E. Backus. These colorful, windblown, raw and immediate, slap-dash paintings were marketed out of the back end of cars along Florida's east coast roads and filled the walls of the new homes of the boom-time real estate era. The reproductions of these works in Monroe's book are of high quality. General readers; lower- and upper-division undergraduates through faculty. M. Kren Kansas State University