Three Farms MD PA ME, 1961
About
Streeter Blair was a primitive painter noted for his innocent, nostalgic portraits of the American past. His paintings--of farmhouses, buggies, children, small towns, and historic events--are similar in spirit and style to those of Grandma Moses.
Many of Blair's paintings portray scenes from his childhood on a farm in Cadmus, Kansas. Others re-create historic scenes, such as a street in the gold rush town of Virginia City, Nevada, and the first electric streetlight in Los Angeles. His subjects are well researched and accurate to the smallest detail.
Blair discovered that he could paint when he was 60 years old, after a lifetime spent in other pursuits, as a school principal, teacher, coach, editor, and, later, as owner of an antique business. His motivation to paint derived in part from his need to describe the farmhouses and barns in Pennsylvania from which he acquired his antiques. By his account, he painted a picture of such a barn and hung it in the antique shop for display. A woman customer asked if it was for sale, and ended up buying it for $25. Thus Blair's artistic career was launched, though he had had some previous artistic experience. In the 1920s and 1930s he published a magazine for boys called The Knicker, for which he wrote the text and did some of the illustrations.
For the next 18 years, Blair dropped almost everything else to paint, earning a reputation as a primitive painter of great talent. He continued in the antique business in Leucadia and Los Angeles until 1961. In 1970, a few years after Blair's death, a Beverly Hills art gallery held a retrospective of his work, offering painting for sale up to $25,000.
Like Grandma Moses, Blair refused formal art instruction, a fact which is reflected in his treatment of perspective, relativity of size, and shadowing. His rivers seem to run uphill and his people are often larger than their horses. His work displays a sweet, nostalgic glow, the joie de vivre of childhood, as remembered by an adult who has chosen to forget the hardships of life in rural turn-of-the-century America.
A gregarious man, Blair was constantly surrounded by friends who came to sit around his fireplace, drink coffee and eat the prize-winning bread Blair baked, while listening to his stories of the old days in Kansas. Among this group were several avant-garde artists, including Edward Kienholz and Billy Al Bengston.
Blair is well-recognized in today's art market, with examples of his work in the following public collections: University of Kansas, Spencer Art Museum; Hirschhorn Collection, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, San Diego; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C; and in numerous private collections.
(This text is adapted from Michael David Zellman (Ed.), 300 Years of American Art. Secaucus, NJ: Wellfleet Press, 1987, p. 325.)
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