One Artist, One Story

by Mike Eckel
Reprinted from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine

Alan Rohan Crite, ABE '68

The building at 410 Columbus Avenue is sinking into the earth of Boston's South End. The bricks are crumbling, and dirty gray paint flakes from windowsills and cornices. It seems as if at any moment the building's decaying shell might crack and spill forth its contents, flooding the street with history: of the neighborhood, of the South End, of ordinary black men and women, of sexuality and the Stations of the Cross and the flotsam genius of the structure's owner and resident, Allan Rohan Crite.

"Art is communication,"
  says Allan Rohan Crite, ABE '68,
  and he's been telling his tale in pencil
  and paint for most of his 90 years.

The building, for now, stands. Inside, on the second floor, the man who created the art that covers virtually every inch of the four-story town-house sits slumped and folded in his armchair. He rests his head, with its sunken cheeks, hewn brow, and wispy hair, in his palette-sized left hand. The walls, the closets, the crannies in Crite's house are scenes from a documentary of nine decades. What he's been telling for 90 years, Crite says, is just one long story. "Art is communication," he says. "You got a story to tell. You want people to listen. So you try and build a relationship with everyone who looks at your art."

Crite's story, however, has been told in a whisper. Some who have listened closely--artists like Paul Goodnight and Susan Thompson, academics and curators like Michael Shinagel and Michael Wentworth--have called Crite the dean of African-American artists in New England, maybe in the country. His descriptions of the world--spoken, written, or, most important, painted--have been heard by only a few.

His earliest sketches are crumbling on decades-old paper. His paintings and gold-pressed reliefs fall from walls, damaged by a leaking roof. Much of his work is unaccounted for, sold over the years for pennies to dealers or collectors unaware of who Crite is. His health is flagging, his hearing is failing, and he is destitute, crumbling into obscurity like the building around him. His 46-year-old wife, Jackie Cox-Crite, is among those hoping to forestall that fate. "We're trying to make sure that he doesn't become a footnote in the literature of twentieth-century art," she says.

Crite was born in New Jersey on March 20, 1910, but soon afterward his family moved to Boston's South End, living on Shawmut Avenue, then Tremont Street, and Dilworth Street. His childhood was modestly middle-class: His father, Oscar William Crite, was a medical student who later became an electrical engineer; his mother, Annamae, was a homemaker and unpublished poet. He was an only child.

The year the family arrived in Boston, Annamae Crite started taking classes in the humanities at the Harvard University Extension School. She encouraged her son's interest in sketching and drawing, and his work attracted the attention of his fifth-grade teacher, who guided him to Charles Herbert Woodbury's Children's Art Centre on Rutland Street. He went on to high school at Boston English, graduating in 1929, and won a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

The pencil drawing of Busy Street.

As Crite finished his studies, his work began to attract attention. By the mid-'30s, his casual sketches of the city's neighborhoods had evolved into oil paintings like Parade on Hammond Street and School's Out and the pencil drawing Busy Street, all vivid scenes of street life in the South End. In 1941, he produced one of his best-known paintings, Harriet and Leon, in which a middle-class man and woman, in profile, walk past the curious stares of two children in an unnamed urban neighborhood. Harriet and Leon was meant, says Crite, to show a black man and woman not as Southern sharecroppers or jazz musicians, but as dignified, ordinary people.

What Crite did in his paintings of the 1930s and '40s, says artist Paul Goodnight, was to single-handedly define a genre in an era when African-Americans were still almost unrecognized in the artistic world. "Allan had the courage to celebrate art about black people when it wasn't celebrated," says Goodnight, a 54-year-old Boston painter and printmaker who has known Crite for 25 years.

Michael Shinagel, dean of continuing education at the Harvard Extension School, where Crite received a bachelor's degree in 1968, considers him as much a documentarian as an artist: "No one has done a better job than Allan in detailing the African-American community in Boston."

In 1929, just as Crite's artistic profile was rising, his father was injured in a workplace accident. For the next eight years, until his father's death, Crite helped his mother care for his father.

During that time, Crite was briefly a member of the Society of Independent Artists, a Boston collective, and he spent a year as a Works Projects Administration artist in the '30s. In 1940, he took a job as an engineering draftsman with the Boston Naval Shipyard, and for the next 30 years, he sketched ships and illustrated machines at the yard. That saved the yard money it would have spent building models, and it furnished Crite with a regular paycheck.

During the 1940s, religious themes became more important in Crite's work. He painted triptychs and altars showing allegorical scenes from the Bible: Christ's Stations of the Cross or the 12 tribes of Israel. He did pen-and-ink illustrations for several books, including Were You There When They Crucified My Lord and Three Spirituals From Earth to Heaven. In the '50s and '60s, he lectured on religious art at seminaries around the country and in Europe, and he designed and painted vestments and banners for St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Cambridge.

He continued to live with and care for his mother, and in 1971, they moved from their Dilworth Street home to the 150-year-old townhouse on Columbus Avenue. Crite's mother died six years later, but he stayed in the house, alone with his accumulating notes, artwork, and clutter.

In the 1980s, scattered accolades came to Crite in the form of honorary doctorates from Suffolk University, Emmanuel College, and Massachusetts College of Art. Harvard honored him with the university's 350th anniversary medal in 1986. That same year, a square some 200 yards from his house, at the corner of Columbus and West Canton Street, was named for him.

Around that time, Crite joined with several local artists to form The Boston Collective. Goodnight, a member of the group, remembers that his curiosity was piqued by Crite's artwork. But he was also intrigued by a man who dropped Spanish and French words into the conversation, who painted while carrying on a discussion that roamed from black migration to the geography of the Bible to abortion. Crite, he says, served as the collective's surrogate father.

Susan Thompson, a Roxbury-based textile artist, also was a member of the collective. She knew Crite when he worked part time at Harvard's Grossman Library. That he has always supported younger artists, attending exhibitions and offering encouragement, endeared him to other aspiring artists. "The art community loves him," says Thompson, 54.

Among a small group of artists, doctoral students, and academics specializing in African-American artists, Crite is a respected entity. But ask a passerby on Columbus Avenue or a young mother sitting in Allan Rohan Crite Square for whom the spot is named, and the response is a blank stare.

"Allan's still undiscovered; he's still practically an unknown artist," says Michael Wentworth, curator of paintings and sculpture at the Boston Athenaeum, which has 18 of Crite's paintings, including Harriet and Leon. "Someday, he will assume a tremendously important position in the whole context of American painting and black artists in the country."

While Crite still labors in relative obscurity, Goodnight now is enjoying critical and commercial success, a fact he attributes partially to his willingness to promote himself--something Crite does hardly at all. "He's always been modest, self-effacing, not self-promotional," says Goodnight. "He's generous, perhaps to a fault. That's just his character."

Another hindrance to Crite's recognition is, in Michael Shinagel's words, "the diaspora of his paintings." Crite has given away dozens of sketches and paintings and sold others for a song. Some 105 public collections, including Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Roxbury's National Center of Afro-American Artists, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Chicago Art Institute, have examples of his work. Perhaps three times as many private collections include works by Crite. But, says Shinagel, no institution or dealer holds "that critical mass where people can say: 'This is an important person.'''

Wentworth says that in many ways, Crite, with his distaste for exhibiting, was his own worst enemy: "He would have been one of the most important black artists of his time, but he's always been indifferent to exhibiting or putting himself forward."

And Crite admits that self-promotion has never interested him. "That's not my business. My business is to do my work to the best of my ability," he says. "If it has an impact, that's nice. I can't do my work worrying about what other people are going to think about it."

Allan Rohan Crite is consumed by art. To worry about anything else--promoting himself, selling art, lecturing, paying bills--is a distraction. "It's no fun to have bills and never enough money to pay for them," he says. "I'm always on the edge of something, and it drives me up a wall."

He scrapes by on a small pension from his naval work, infrequent honorariums from lectures, and occasional sales of his artwork. In 1994, the Limited Book Club in New York published an illustrated Book of Revelations by Crite, at $3,000 a copy. Proceeds from the book fell short of expectations, though.

And art doesn't stop the phone company from turning off service now and again, or other utilities from asking for overdue payment. "The utilities, they're not impressed with my work," Crite says. Then there's the fear that the Columbus Avenue house, in need of more than $1 million in restorations and repairs, and a sizable tax drain, may need to be sold.

"You would think he would've made it," says Thompson. "You've proven yourself over and over and over again, but you're still poor. It's just not happening with Allan."

It still may happen, though. Crite's wife, Jackie, is working tirelessly to organize a foundation to preserve his legacy.

She and Allan met in the early 1990s, when she worked at the National Center of Afro-American Artists. Jackie was a financial analyst who, after years of dabbling in art dealing and volunteering at museums, decided to start an art consulting business. She began helping Allan try to organize his volumes of work and begin to plan for his death.

It was his idea to get married, she says. While Cox-Crite had been married once before, Allan Crite had spent his adult life taking care first of his father, then his mother, who died in the late 1970s. His shyness and idiosyncrasy also kept him from marrying, she says. But now, "Allan insisted I would be better respected as Mrs. Crite than as his agent," Cox-Crite says. Even though she was half his age, she says, "the long and the short of it was that he needed help. It's no more complicated than that."

They married in 1993, and since then, she has served not only as agent but also as chauffeur, nurse, secretary, spokeswoman, estate planner, and curator, among other roles. Mostly, she has focused on the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute, a project in the making for 15 years. It's only in the past few years, though, that serious efforts have been made to raise money and track down and catalogue his works.

"We're still trying to pull things out of the closets, dust them off, and say, 'What is this? What do we need to do to it?'" says Cox-Crite. "There are a million stories here that we want to share with people."

Raising money for the foundation is a massive effort as well. Cox-Crite is organizing a weeklong event for next spring at the Boston Center for the Arts, hoping it will serve as a fund-raising campaign for the institute as well as a major exhibition of Crite's art. Also next spring, Seattle's Frye Museum is planning a major retrospective of Crite's work. "There's so much work to be done," she says. "And Allan doesn't have a lot of time left."

Crite agrees that something needs to be done. But, as always, he doesn't want to be the one to do it. "Somebody, I guess, has to look after the work," he says. "If I don't do anything, what's going to happen to it? 'Course, in a certain way, I don't care, because I'll be dead."

The vault of history that is Crite's townhouse strains with the volume and weight of art and documentary. At 90 years of age, Crite is content to bear the weight of that history. The hope is that others may glean something from this vault crowded with work, now or in the future. He's always been a teacher, he says, and he hopes the lessons of, for example, Madonna of the Subway (1946) or a sketch of the Dudley Street trolleys (1975) might benefit schoolchildren or art scholars someday.

Crite's example--the vision of his art, the dedication to his craft, and his choice of subjects--is a lesson in itself, says Wentworth. And his situation at 90 years of age, the roof crumbling over his head, makes the lesson a sad one. "I think it is tragic," says Wentworth. "It's a tragedy for any black artist in America in the '30s and '40s, when there never was any real recognition. And we're still not there yet. When we finally judge him just as an artist, not as a black artist, I think then we'll have done something."

Though he hasn't done an oil painting in 25 years, Crite has remained prolific, doing sketches and pen-and-ink drawings: Thousands of stacks line the shelves on the walls of his studio, bedroom, and study. "People like to try and pin me down: 'How do you classify this? How do you classify that?' That's the tendency these days," Crite says, pointing at some of the work covering his walls. "We don't live life in compartments. Life is a continuous stream." All the sketches, the icons, the portraits, the diptychs, the lithographs, they're all part of that single stream, that single story, for Crite.

"I've only done one piece of work in my life," he says. "I regard everything I've done since age six as part of one work. And I'll stop working on it only when I die."

Last spring, Mr. Crite delivered a lecture on his art at Harvard University.

Editor's Note: Tax deductible donations may be sent to the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute (ARCRI), 410 Columbus Ave., Boston, MA 02116. For more information, call (617) 266-0488.

This article appeared in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine on July 16, 2000. Mike Eckel is a reporter and freelance writer who lives in Montpelier, Vermont.