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Allan Crite at Home

A Tour of His House-Museum
in Boston's South End

Anyone who has attended a Harvard Extension Alumni Banquet will remember seeing Allan R. Crite, ABE '68. In recent years Mr. Crite has taken on the look of a senior philosopher, watching life through artist's eyes and musing on the human condition with the insight and affection of his 88 years. The Crite connection in the history of the Extension School is unavoidable, as Annamae Palmer Crite began taking classes here in 1910--the year after the school was founded by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, and the year Mr. Allan Crite was born.

Allan Crite

Allan Crite made a name for himself in the art world in 1936 when, as a 26-year-old graduate of the Boston public schools and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, he exhibited his paintings and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City and at Harvard University's Fogg Museum. In the years that followed, Mr. Crite's portraits of African-American community life, of the ordinary and extraordinary people he met, and of scenes from biblical and religious history would be widely exhibited and published. His prints and paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Museum, the Boston Public Library, the Library of the Boston Athenaeum, and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston; the MOMA; the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; and the Art Institute in Chicago. Published volumes of his works span 50 years, from Were You There and Three Spirituals, published by Harvard University Press in the 1940s, to his illustrations in the Book of Revelation, from the Limited Edition Book Club of New York in 1994.

Mr. Crite has exhibited and lectured in galleries, schools, colleges, and churches in the United States, and in the People's Republic of China; received honorary doctorates in the humanities, fine arts, and divinity; received the 350th Harvard University Anniversary Medal; and was honored by the establishment of the Annamae and Allan R. Crite Prizes to recognize the family's long association with the Harvard Extension School.

One day this spring, visitors from the Harvard University Extension School Alumni Bulletin paid a visit to the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute, which also happens to be Mr. Crite's home at 410 Columbus Avenue in Boston's South End. The four-story row house is unremarkable from the street, but inside the walls are filled with a joyful profusion of works dating from a childhood when Annamae Crite sent her pesky son off to draw so she could finish her Extension School homework assignments. While Mr. Crite has reluctantly allowed some of his best-known works to hang in the great museums, he has kept most of his works at home. Every inch of the Crite house-museum is covered with framed paintings, hinged altarpieces, etchings, prints, files, memorabilia, periodicals, and books (including his own Harvard Extension textbooks).

Mr. Crite is the perfect host, warming up to a tape recorder as if it were a dear group of alumni friends or the art reporter from the Boston Globe. As we go from room to room, he spins a yarn for every picture. What about the photo in the oval frame over here? "Well, that's my mother and me in 1916, about the time I began to draw. She was going to the Harvard Extension School already, and got the idea that education was the most important thing you can get. My father, Oscar Crite, was an engineer who had attended Cornell College and the University of Vermont, although he never finished. My portrait of him, over here, shows the effects of the electrical accident he suffered in 1927. Then, the year he died, 1937, my mother took me by the ear and said, 'You need to get some more education.' I had just completed my art studies at the Museum School and was beginning to see the possibilities in an art career. But she dragged me over to Extension--by the ear!"

Allan Crite with his mother Annamae Palmer Crite, in 1916.

For 30 years Allan Crite took courses in liberal arts along with his mother, who studied "everything" (says Allan) from 1910 to the late sixties. Along the way, he worked in the Grossman Library, where the librarian, James Gilligan, allowed him to sketch and draw when traffic was slow. In 1968 Mr. Crite graduated as first Marshal of his class with a Bachelor of Arts in Extension Studies.

What about that one up there? "Well, that's a pencil drawing called Busy Street from 1935. I'm in the center. I like to be in the center. And there is a young lady on my arm. Her name was Gretchen Cotton. You'll see an oil painting of her later on in the hallway. Somebody got her before I did--Avon Longwood, a famous doctor. They married and moved to New York. There was always a pretty girl on the block, but somebody always got her before I did," he concluded with a twinkle. "That's the story of my life."

Busy Street,above and right, is the drawing that gave Allan Crite national recognition at the age of 26.

Mr. Crite's Busy Street is much more than a document of unrequited love, however. It reflects the qualities that boosted the 25-year-old artist to national recognition the following year--scenes that bring the viewer out onto a busy street in the African-American community, drawn with a directness and insight that transcends race. "When I started drawing in the 20s and 30s," he recalls, "there was a lot of talk about 'the Negro Question.' But, in my opinion, they got so tied up in the debate they sort of forgot they were talking about people. So, what I did was make ordinary drawings and paintings of people--people of color, yes--but ordinary people that I knew, who lived in the neighborhood." Mr. Crite's neighbors in the South End thanked him in 1986 by persuading the Boston City Council to name the intersection nearest his house Allan Rohan Crite Square--the only square in Boston named for a nonmilitary hero.

Among the many topics Allan Crite likes to talk about is the growing sense of multiculturalism that links peoples and nations today. "I think this idea struck me as a child visiting the Museum of Fine Arts. The African and Asian art collections--anything non-European--made the deepest impression on me and struck me as the roots from which all European art must surely have sprung. The head of the Asian Department, a kindly Japanese man, gave me some beautiful block prints and brush drawings. I think this was the beginning of a love affair that finally resulted in my trip to China in 1989."

Another feature of Mr. Crite's prolific output are his biblical and religious works--from drawings for the weekly church bulletins at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Mr. Crite's neighborhood, to illustrations for collections of African-American spirituals, to large altarpieces and paintings which have graced the Cambridge, Massachusetts monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist and other churches around the country. In these works we see again the ordinary folk of present-day Boston, transposed to scenes of biblical times and scenes in the lives of the saints. In 1994 Christ Church Episcopal in Bronxville, New York, dedicated a stained glass window in Mr. Crite's honor, calling him "the best-known artist in the Episcopal Church."

As our two-hour visit to the Crite Research Institute comes to an end, the artist seems only to be getting started. We receive copies of A Walking Tour and Study Guide: Allan Rohan Crite's South End, and a copy of his curriculum vitae and biographical sketch. Looking over these materials, lovingly prepared by Mr. Crite's wife, Jackie Cox-Crite, Director of the Research Institute and cataloguer of his works, we find the "Artist's Statement," which sums up the philosophy of one of the Harvard Extension School's most beloved and celebrated alumni:

As a visual artist, I am in the communication business, as are all the disciplines of the arts: the performing arts in music and drama, the written arts from poems, sagas, news items, and all the broadcast media, from talking drums to electronic networks. As a visual artist, I am part of that tradition, a storyteller of the drama of man. This is my small contribution--to tell the African American experience--in a local sense, of the neighborhood, and, in a larger sense, of its part in the total human experience.

As we left, Allan Crite returned quickly to his studio to finish a strikingly beautiful sketch of a young woman.

Allan Crite and Dean Michael Shinagel admired the Book of Revelation in 1994.

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