ALLAN ROHAN CRITE african american art sketch drawing Start Price USD 750.00 Current Price USD 750.00 Time Left - Bid Count 0 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Thursday, July 17, 2008 End Time Thursday, July 24, 2008 Location Michigan See more about 'ALLAN ROHAN CRITE african american art sketch drawing' Description Crite, Allan RohanALL GLORY Brush Drawing Meditations on the Prayer Description: DJ shows wear and small open tears. Faint lettering to DJ rear, not sure whether it is part of the design or 'bleed through' but still hard to find with DJ; Unpaginated. B&W drawings representing the prayer of consecration. INSCRIBED with original drawing by author ; B&W Illustrations; 8vo. Born in 1910 in Plainfield, New Jersey, of African, Indian, and European ancestry, Crite has spent most of his life in Boston. During the course of his long life, Crite enjoyed an extensive career as a painter, draftsman, printmaker, author, librarian, and publisher. At an early age his mother encouraged him to draw and paint, and he took art classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts School of Art, and Boston University. Later he focused on history and the natural sciences, earning a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University and an honorary doctorate from Suffolk University in Boston. During the 1930s, Crite worked under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, and in the early 1940s began a thirty-year career as a technical illustrator for the Department of the Navy. A visual chronicler of life in Boston, he is active in the Episcopal Church and is a prolific creator of liturgical art. Crite’s longstanding interest in recording the urban scene reveals his desire to depict black people as ordinary citizens rather than as Southern sharecroppers or Harlem jazz musicians, images that were becoming prevalent and stereotypical by the 1930s. Crite frequently taps history and autobiography to connect people of color and himself to a larger context, carefully composing the settings of his works to ground them in reality and to make the images accessible to the viewer. The figures in Crite’s work are individualized in appearance and clothing. An emphasis on fine detail is in part a manifestation of Crite’s ongoing study of the detailed paintings found in Flemish Late Gothic art. Variations in brushwork, along with rich colors, animate the surface of Crite’s paintings. Even though he was aware of modernism, Crite chose a representational style because it was natural to him and appropriate to his form of communication. “I'm a storyteller, telling a story of people,” Crite claimed, “and I started out with my own people in the immediate sense, like the neighborhood, and people in a general sense when I make a neighborhood out of the whole world.” Born in 1910 in Plainfield, New Jersey, of African, Indian, and European ancestry, Crite has spent most of his life in Boston. During the course of his long life, Crite enjoyed an extensive career as a painter, draftsman, printmaker, author, librarian, and publisher. At an early age his mother encouraged him to draw and paint, and he took art classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts School of Art, and Boston University. Later he focused on history and the natural sciences, earning a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University and an honorary doctorate from Suffolk University in Boston. During the 1930s, Crite worked under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, and in the early 1940s began a thirty-year career as a technical illustrator for the Department of the Navy. A visual chronicler of life in Boston, he is active in the Episcopal Church and is a prolific creator of liturgical art. Crite’s longstanding interest in recording the urban scene reveals his desire to depict black people as ordinary citizens rather than as Southern sharecroppers or Harlem jazz musicians, images that were becoming prevalent and stereotypical by the 1930s. Crite frequently taps history and autobiography to connect people of color and himself to a larger context, carefully composing the settings of his works to ground them in reality and to make the images accessible to the viewer. The figures in Crite’s work are individualized in appearance and clothing. An emphasis on fine detail is in part a manifestation of Crite’s ongoing study of the detailed paintings found in Flemish Late Gothic art. Variations in brushwork, along with rich colors, animate the surface of Crite’s paintings. Even though he was aware of modernism, Crite chose a representational style because it was natural to him and appropriate to his form of communication. “I'm a storyteller, telling a story of people,” Crite claimed, “and I started out with my own people in the immediate sense, like the neighborhood, and people in a general sense when I make a neighborhood out of the whole world.”Crite’s longstanding interest in recording the urban scene reveals his desire to depict black people as ordinary citizens rather than as Southern sharecroppers or Harlem jazz musicians, images that were becoming prevalent and stereotypical by the 1930s. Crite frequently taps history and autobiography to connect people of color and himself to a larger context, carefully composing the settings of his works to ground them in reality and to make the images accessible to the viewer. The figures in Crite’s work are individualized in appearance and clothing. An emphasis on fine detail is in part a manifestation of Crite’s ongoing study of the detailed paintings found in Flemish Late Gothic art. Variations in brushwork, along with rich colors, animate the surface of Crite’s paintings. Even though he was aware of modernism, Crite chose a representational style because it was natural to him and appropriate to his form of communication. “I'm a storyteller, telling a story of people,” Crite claimed, “and I started out with my own people in the immediate sense, like the neighborhood, and people in a general sense when I make a neighborhood out of the whole world.”  Earning and adopting the title of artist-reporter, Allan Rohan Crite (b. 1910) recorded the people, architecture, and daily activities of African Americans in Boston's Roxbury and South End districts during the 1930s and 1940s. His oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints capture the parades, games, conversations, work, and spirit of a past era with expressive lines and vivid colors. According to the artist, his intention was to show aspects of life in the city with special reference to the use of the terminology 'black' people and to present them in an ordinary light, persons enjoying the usual pleasures of life with its mixtures of both sorrow and joy. 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 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!"       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." 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. 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.     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." Beyond depicting the particular events and spaces of the African American community, Allan Crite's imagery acknowledges spiritual values and traditions. A devout Episcopalian, the artist also turned his attention and talents toward sacred subjects and liturgical objects. In addition to authoring and illustrating three religious books, Crite painted triptychs, altars, murals, vestments, and banners for local churches. Now past the age of ninety, Allan Rohan Crite can truly be considered an artist-historian. The Frye Art Museum is pleased to honor his achievements and make them better known to a wider audience. Allan Rohan Crite was raised in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1936. He became an vital member of Boston's art community, and one of the most important African-American artists of the twentieth century. Crite's early paintings depict the daily life of Boston's African-American community. According to Crite, he sought to show viewers the "real Negro" as opposed to the "Harlem" or "jazz Negro," that was created by white people. In his later work, religious themes dominated, offering a message of hope and deliverance. During the 1950s Crite wrote and illustrated books with theological themes telling "the story of man through the black figure."On Oct-17-07 at 17:21:16 PDT, seller added the following information: kirstiealley Store Place a Bid!