Late Starter

By the age of 60, Streeter Blair had tried half a dozen careers. He had taught Latin, managed a haberdashery, edited a boys' magazine called The Knicker, ended up operating a successful antique shop in Los Angeles.

For all this modest success, he would be little noted except for the happenstance that one day a customer bought some unrecorded artifact and asked him to describe the old Pennsylvania farmhouse it came from. Words failed him, and he decided that the only way he could convey his vision was to paint it--even though he had not really put brush to canvas since childhood. To his astonishment, the woman insisted on buying it for $25. With that chance sale,

Blair began painting himself into the annals of American art.

Relatively few years were left to him before his death at the age of 78, but in that time, Streeter's "primitive" paintings won growing admiration. Currently, Beverly Hills' Sari Heller Gallery is mounting a show of his work, asking up to $25,000 for a painting.

Delightful Cow Paths. As with any authentic primitive painter, Blair's first subject was the farm--and the oldtime farm at that. Blair had all the credentials. Back in 1888, when Blair was born, his father ran the local Grange store in Cadmus, Kans. As a child he earned 50-c- a day by working from sunup to sundown in the surrounding fields. He thought he hated it--the boredom, the ignorance, the poverty. "A cow path is delightful if you are out for a stroll, but not if you are trying to get somewhere," he observed later. But by the time he started to paint, he had already got somewhere, and his imagination ranged back to those delightful cow paths. He painted youngsters playing leapfrog, Christmas carolers practicing around the family piano, Kansans enjoying an ice-cream strawberry social.

Thus, as a purveyor of nostalgia, Blair invited comparison with Grandma Moses. He too was unable to conquer perspective or master the technique of shadow. His rivers run up and down hillsides in carefree disregard of Newton, and the passengers in his buckboards are sometimes bigger than the animals that pull them. Like Grandma, he never went to art shows, completely ignored art magazines, and firmly refused to take formal instruction.

But he had an instinctive color sense that went beyond mere representation. Grandma Moses invariably painted skies the way they looked--blue, grey or indeterminate shades in between. Blair boldly painted his skies whatever color seemed appropriate. He recognized, for instance, that a blue sky above Wichita, 1923 would be totally inconsonant with the painting's overall tonality, and that it would destroy the closed ambience of Virginia City, Nevada, 1878. So he painted one an arbitrary red, the other a brooding yellow.

Blair was also more of a traveler. He spent time in 35 states and remembered most of them. Those he did not remember he tried to imagine. All the historical scenes that he recreated, whether of a picnic or a town at a particular moment in time, were painstakingly researched not only for topography but also for the costumes of the ladies and the shape of the horse-cars. His picture of bringing the Yule log into a Baltimore house is a scene that ostensibly portrays Blair's father and himself as a small boy. It is a scene that never was -- the family never -lived in Baltimore.

Earthy Aphorist. If the public was slow to discover Blair, young avant-garde artists were not. Such radicals as Edward Kienholz and Billy Al Bengston forgathered at the old house Blair had bought in Los Angeles, admired his paintings and delighted in his company. Blair always gave them coffee (he kept careful records on just how each guest preferred it) and his own home-baked bread, for which he won many prizes at county fairs. Afterward, everybody pitched horseshoes in the backyard and listened to Blair's inexhaustible tales of his and other people's pasts. His speech was marked by rattling prosody and tart aphorisms. Samples: "Two bottles that hold less than they appear to hold are a perfume bottle and a whisky bottle." "Truth is stranger than falsies." "We can't go through the eye of a needle because of our baggage."

Blair died 2 1/2 years ago. "As a person, he was one of nature's most successful experiments," says Kienholz. As a painter, he was his own best experiment -- and should survive.

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