The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters

By Gary Monroe

Book Overview

"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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813022819
• ISBN13: 9780813022819
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 10.0" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

The Real thing

This is the real thing. This is the original Highwayman art book that first documented the journey of the highwaymen, who they were and how they got here. It is referenced by countless sources as the official list of the original 26 highwaymen. The first half of the book is mostly text with a few example prints interspersed and the second half is all plates of representative Highwaymen art. There now are several highwaymen art books, including 2 more by this author but this book serves as the bible for Highwaymen artist history.

The Highwaymen

One of the first if not the very first comprehensive study of Florida's black regional landscape artist known since 1994 as "The Highwaymen". This book gives a good overview and a wonderful historical look at these "outsider artist", the times they lived in and painted in along Florida's treasure coast. A recommended buy for any lover of Old Florida!

Florida's African-American Landscape painters

Great book! Such talent needs to be recognized and applauded.

Idealized Florida

In 1994, art aficionado Jim Fitch assigned the name "Highwaymen" to a loose association of young, mostly untrained black artists (including one woman) from the Fort Pierce area who created thousands of Florida landscapes and marketed them from the backs of their cars for about $25 in the 1960's and `70's. Theirs was an unabashedly commercial venture, and the artists collaborated to create and sell works as quickly and cheaply as possible. Dismissed as "motel art" at the time, these intense, lush and at times otherworldly depictions of an idealized Florida have become a subject of renewed interest and critical attention in recent years. Consequently, many myths and vague tales have grown up around the group. As part of his research, author Gary Monroe interviewed many of the remaining artists to bring the story to life, presented here in a 26-page annotated essay. In analyzing the art, he insists that the speed with which they worked was far from a detriment: "By unintentionally bastardizing the canonical pictorial strategies...they created a new form of fantasy landscape painting." The artists found their strength as colorists, and the emotional hues capture the essence of Florida (or at least, as we imagine it.) As a northerner who visited Florida twice as a child in the pre-Disney days, I must confess that the 63 glorious full-color reproductions here gave me goose bumps of fond memory, real or imagined. A followup: This book launched an explosion of interest in The Highwaymen. Surviving members no longer need hawk their wares, since collectors now come to them and new works sell for as much as $18,000. The were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004.

Great coffee table book for those who long for the beach.

An all-inclusive journey through the lives and souls of African American painters from days gone by. These creative souls painted breathtaking beach landscapes... Many of their works still survive today, and sell for [a small fortune]. (I know, I have one in my living room.) A great buy! Just be warned; one look through it's pages will draw you toward Florida's shores lke a child to the smell of cotton candy!