No ordinary painter

THE BOSTON painter Allan Rohan Crite claimed that he wanted to paint "ordinary" black people, not the jazz men, the Harlemites, or the sharecroppers of the 1930s, but rather the people "you just didn't hear about," the black people he saw in Boston, where he lived, as he explained in a series of interviews done with the Smithsonian Institution in 1979 and 1980.

So in one 1941 painting there's "Leon and Harriet," an African-American couple walking down a South End street past one of Boston's quintessential backdrops, a wall of red brick row houses. And in a 1935 work, there's "Parade on Hammond Street," a Roxbury block with those ubiquitous row houses and an elegantly tall bandleader followed by musicians in blue and white uniforms. The watching crowd includes men in jackets and ties and women in long flowing dresses.

As portraits of the ordinary, these works successfully fail, because once an incisive artist captures people on canvas, they gain an extraordinary longevity. So although Crite died earlier this month at age 97, his painted people march on, and echoes of their world persist. It's a world of old-fashioned hats, strikingly good posture, and formal clothes (at least by today's more revealing and loose-fitting standards).

Crite also created works with religious themes, including illustrations of Negro spirituals. In some works religion and street scenes mix, showing, for example, a Madonna and child on the subway - a kind of commentary on the thin line between ordinary and extraordinary, on how any mother and child on a subway are at once blandly familiar and sacred.

Born in New Jersey, Crite moved to Boston as a baby. He went to Boston's public schools, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and Harvard's extension school.

Crite's lasting contribution is this collection of art of what he saw. His work is an affront to popular trends, present and past, and an elevation of daily life. So while Boston has a well-known image built of famous icons such as Paul Revere, the Red Sox, and the Public Garden, it's Crite who offers a more unique view of Boston, one seen by a devotedly observant resident.