Artist as theologian
Aritist Allan Rohan Crite, featured on Episcopal Cafe's Art Blog, is memorialized by The National Catholic Reporter as a man who was "keenly aware of the presence of Christ in the world."
Rachelle Linner of NCR writes of Crite:
Allan Rohan Crite, a painter of everyday African-American life and the granddaddy of the Boston arts scene, died Sept. 6 at the age of 97. At his funeral in Boston’s Trinity Church, the Rev. Edward Rodman, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, eulogized Mr. Crite as a “lay theologian.” It is a particularly apt description of this generous, gentle and gracious artist whose works are suffused with a profound incarnational sensibility and informed by a vocabulary of worship that draws from the sacramental life of the Anglican communion.In his introduction to Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven, a book of pen and ink drawings on Negro spirituals published in 1948 by Harvard University Press, Mr. Crite wrote that spirituals are a “religious musical literature dedicated to the adoration and worship of almighty God.” Mr. Crite’s work as a storyteller, liturgical artist and illustrator of the spirituals reveals a similar genius, a religious visual literature that moves the viewer to gratitude and praise.
Allan Crite’s contribution to American art is unfortunately underappreciated. This was due, in no small part, to his adamant refusal to engage in self-promotion. His importance is difficult to gauge because his work is scattered throughout 105 public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and Washington’s Phillips Collection.
About his sense of the community of humanity:
Allan Crite had a profound sense of our common humanity, a lived philosophy that evokes the Pauline language of the Mystical Body of Christ. “We are part of each other. So anything that happens to any part of us, we all feel. But the thing is, we think that we’re doing something to somebody ‘over there’ who’s different from me,” he said. “Actually what we’re doing is doing something to ourselves through that person. So if we do an injury to that particular person, we’re hurting. And if something happens to that particular person, we feel it. That probably accounts for, you might say, the extreme and sharp pain that a lot of us feel. We’re thinking we’re doing to somebody else, but it’s happening to us. That, in my opinion, is the real tragedy.”
We know that some artists address issues of contemporary life through a process of moral and theological questioning. Some artists choose to feature the results of their inquiries in their work, offering the audience a keener relationship with the world situation. Herein an opportunity arises to share Love, the Christ, with the viewer. If an artist’s work fails to offer a means of conflict resolution, fails to present hope and promise in the mind and heart of the Christ, it is more than missed opportunity - it is a reaffirming of a worldview of powerlessness, despair, danger and degradation. Art takes on an entirely new dimension, a transcendence, when an artist’s insight into the pain and suffering of the world is paired at its core with the redemptive promise of Christ.
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December 18, 2007 12:44 PM
Alan Crite supplemented his income during the 1960's and 1970's by creating bulletin covers for parishes that subscribed. My home parish, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford, CT, used bulletin covers drawn by Mr. Crite. They were keyed to the lectionary of the 1928 BCP. I don't whether he drew them for printing on an offset press or on those green stencil sheets that old Gestetner duplicators used, but whatever, they were always keyed both to the lesson and to the parish.
I remember as a child pouring over each cover to find the details: there were buildings like the Traveller's tower that he would sneak in, for example, and there was always a likeness of our parish. One other little detail: each week he drew a small jet plane flying overhead.
So even as the figures may be dressed in biblical or liturgical garb, the settings became at once ancient and modern. Grounded in the Biblical story and brought forward to where we lived, worked and worshipped.
I can honestly say that Mr. Crite's theology was a significant part of my own formation. Seeing these images week after week, coloring on them, asking my parents and church school teachers about them were part of both an artistic and theological process.
It trained my eye to see and most of all taught me that Jesus is here, he is now, he is with us and among us and walking with us. Seeing Jesus rendered from an African-American eye liberated Jesus from the white-suburban images that I grew up with, and also started me thinking about where we might find the face of Jesus today.
It was many years later that I came to appreciate the impact of this artist on my spiritual formation and on the consciousness of the Church.
Andrew Gerns
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December 18, 2007 2:59 PM