A plainspoken painting that subtly kicks against stereotypes

Washington Post

24-04-2025

Great Works, In Focus
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#191 A plainspoken painting that subtly kicks against stereotypes
The 'artist-reporter' Allan Rohan Crite's straightforward depictions of ordinary Black city life challenged simplistic assumptions.
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Column by Sebastian Smee
April 24, 2025 at 11:05 a.m. EDT
4 minutes ago
3 min
Allan Rohan Crite painted 'Bass Violin Player' in 1941 and gave it, along with dozens of his other artworks, to the Boston Athenaeum 30 years later. It shows a man in a room playing an upright stringed instrument. What's not clear is what kind of music he is playing.
In the 1930s and '40s, Crite painted dozens of street scenes showing African Americans going about their daily lives in Boston. His chosen manner did not embrace African-influenced stylization in the manner of other artists connected with the Harlem Renaissance, nor was it about virtuosity or polish. It was concerned primarily with depicting life as it is lived by ordinary African Americans in an urban setting.
In this rare image of a musician rehearsing, Crite conveys a sense of movement with brisk, deft brushstrokes. The man's at-the-ready pose, the slightly jaunty shape of his jacket's lapels and the freshness with which he conveys the fabric's creases all suggest a dynamism that feeds into the painting's immediacy.
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Is the man playing jazz?
I'm going to say probably not.
Being an 'artist-reporter,' as Crite saw himself — trying to capture a panorama of life as it's lived by any given group — can get unexpectedly complicated when you press in on the idea. It may mean leaning into all the things your community shares — the kind of food you like to eat, your politics, your musical tastes, maybe your hair or your skin color.
But it may also mean wriggling out of other people's lazy descriptions of you.
Crite, who will be the subject of two exhibitions this fall, at the Boston Athenaeum and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, loved his Boston community. He loved feeling like he and everyone in it belonged to something important, as they surely did. But if Crite's audience was tempted to associate urban Black culture with jazz clubs and nightlife, as depicted by such artists as Archibald Motley and Aaron Douglas, Crite wanted none of it.
He was a religious man. (He once produced a book pairing African American spirituals with illustrations in which he cast holy figures as Black people.) His heartfelt ambition was to show his audience the 'real Negro' — as he referred to it — as opposed to the 'Harlem' or 'jazz Negro,' which he saw as a kind of fiction created by White people.
His own feelings about jazz, which he associated with debauchery and disorder, seem to have come from his mother, who regarded jazz and the dancing it encouraged as 'almost the drumbeat to the Devil.'
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Crite's attitude chimes with criticisms made by the trumpeter and jazz advocate Wynton Marsalis of rap and hip-hop, which he has labeled 'ghetto minstrelsy.'
You could say that both Crite (in judging jazz) and Marsalis (in denigrating hip-hop) were missing something important. But we, too, may be missing something vital if we don't admit how complicated it can be, on the one hand, to embrace belonging and, on the other, to think for ourselves, to push back against other people's urges to link who we are with what we like.