Monroe makes a strong case for the personal qualities of this thoroughly commercial work, while still acknowledging its strong affinity with kitsch. At first glance the work may look like Holiday Inn art show material but it's not, even if many of these artists cranked it out as fast as they could, sometimes selling their pictures before the paint had dried. They transcend their often-clichéd subject matter with creative energy.
The Highwaymen as a group represented a more or less loose association of 26 men and one woman, mostly from the Ft. Pierce, Florida, area. They sold their work, an estimated 50,000 or more paintings, from the roadside or in building lobbies for $25 or so a canvas.
And they worked fast. Monroe points out that the Highwaymen typically did not draw their scenes first -- they rendered with paints.
Alfred Hair, one of the group's leaders, "never aspired to be the best artist, just the fastest," according to Monroe. According to a colleague, Hair worked out so he could paint faster. And he sometimes painted up to 20 pictures at a time, using assistants to put paint on the boards for him to spread and detail. This focus on speed introduced a significant element of chance into his landscapes, since he clearly did not carefully plan out his pictures.
It also resulted, Monroe says, in an intuitive approach that turned what might have been plain kitsch into something unconventional. "Let your mind wander," Monroe quotes Hair as saying, noting that Hair worked from memory, without a sketchpad or photos. "A pureness and spiritedness came through in the early works as the artists lost themselves in the physical act of painting rapidly," Monroe writes.
Still, although Monroe emphasizes Hair's love of painting, the point of this efficient approach was also to sell more paintings, which for these mostly working-class artists represented financial opportunity and escape from more conventional life choices.
It was the promise of that escape that drew many of these non-would-be artists into learning to create, inspired by the examples of friends or relatives. Monroe describes them sometimes working in what only can be called painting bees, where they would set up in a backyard, critiquing each other's efforts as they painted in a party atmosphere.
Should the thoroughly commercial, aesthetically casual motivation of these artists affect how their work is appraised? At the very least, their lack of formal training and their working methods led their art to diverge from that of A.E. Backus, the trained white painter who served as their inspiration and mentor. In the kind of turnabout that has annoyed any number of trained artists, the Highwaymen's work gained far wider distribution (and fame) than Backus'. In this case, though, Monroe says, Backus was "wonderfully supportive of the young black painters, and they idolized him."
This book reveals a body of work that conveys a definite feeling of time and place, as well as personal variances that become increasingly visible as you examine the selection of pictures. The colors are the most easily striking elements, but other qualities come through. They range from pictures of almost-schematic simplicity to nuanced views showing a sensitivity reminiscent of old Chinese landscapes, which are another example of highly conventionalized views of nature. Indeed, reminiscent of those landscapes, these pictures sometimes capture a monumentality not always evident in the real Florida.
Ultimately, a big part of what makes the Highwaymen story interesting is that this group created a body of serious art work that was available to people with ordinary budgets and ordinary tastes in art, people whose exposure to canonistic art would have been limited to an occasional museum visit or Christmas card reproduction, if that. That makes this material far more vernacular than much of the work currently being slapped with that label - work whose uniqueness and lack of mass accessibility makes a label like "outsider" seem far more appropriate.
This review appeared in Intuit's Outsider magazine.
The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters