Customer Reviews

Hughie Lee Smith (The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art)

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What a treasure.This is a wonderful book about one of the worlds most neglected artist.Fifty seven full page full color reproductions,plus numerous photos.A thoughtful and insightful biography.These paintings are as haunting and poetic as De Chirico's.Lee-Smith's work evokes the loneliness and isolation of the African-American experience from the depression untill the late nineties.

I try to make it a thing to discover a new artist or work everytime I visit a major art museum for the first time.

Walking thru the fantastic African American wing @ the DIA,I came upon four paintings which stopped me in my tracks.They all featured a lone figure in the midst of a vast,decaying urban landscape.These subjects all seemed to be in a state of contemplation,as if surveying their current dilemmas which surrounded them.

It occured to me that this guy wasn't painting everyday urban scenes,but depicting images which were borderline surreal,almost,and I say ALMOST,in the same vein as De Chirico.These are pictoral equivalents to different states of mind and feeling.Hughie's images connect with us since we've all been in the place his subjects find themselves in.Lonely,but with a sense of hope.Quiet reflection in an otherwise loud and fast paced world.Looking far and wide across great spaces to find our place.

Onto the book itself,the text is well written and provides a thorough biography of the artist.It puts his various works into context and provides beautiful reproductions.

This seems to be the only book on the artist,which is such a shame,however we are lucky that the only one out there hits all the right notes.