Oral history interviews with Allan Rohan Crite, 1979 Jan. 16-1980 Oct. 22

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interviews with Allan Rohan Crite, 1979 Jan. 16-1980 Oct. 22, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Allan Rohan Crite
Conducted by Robert Brown
January 16, 1979 culminating on October 22, 1980

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Allan Rohan Crite on January 16, 1979 and culminating on October 22, 1980. The interview was conducted by Robert Brown for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

 

[TAPE 1, SIDE 1]

Note: Susan Thompson, associate of Crite, participated in interview of Oct. 22.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I was born March 20, 1910, at 190 Grove Street, North Plainfield, NJ. As far as my memory of the place is concerned, I'll be a little bit vague because I left there when I was less than a year old, and came to Boston. But I did go back just recently, during the month of December, so I had a chance to see my birthplace -- the house is still standing. It's a funny little two-storey frame house, on a tree-lined street.

ROBERT BROWN: Why did your parents bring you up here [Boston]?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, I brought my parents to Boston (both laugh). I really don't know, exactly. My father was studying at Cornell University, and then I think he came and went to the University of Vermont. I think my mother, when she came to Boston, worked out in Danvers for some wealthy family there. They felt as though the atmosphere in Massachusetts probably would be a little better, or something like that; I'm not too sure. Anyway, Dad went to the University of Vermont for about a year, and then we settled in Boston.

ROBERT BROWN: He was an engineer, wasn't he?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE He started out as a doctor. Then he switched to engineering for some reason or other. He got a first-class engineer's license about 1923, I think. He may have been one of the first black people to get an engineer's license in Massachusetts -- I don't think he was the first, but one of the first. There aren't too many of them floating around. It's rather difficult to get an engineer's license in Massachusetts anyhow -- it has the reputation for being very thorough, very tough. So it's quite an accomplishment.

ROBERT BROWN: He was a good deal older than your mother, right?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, he was 35 when he married my mother; she was 18 at the time. I think they got married on June 5, because his birthday came on June 7 and he wanted to reduce the span of years as much as possible. [RB laughs] So 35 and 18 sounded a little better than 36 and 18, I guess. [Both laugh]

ROBERT BROWN: What do you remember of him? Your father died long before your mother did . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. He died in 1937. Well, the impression I have of him is of a very powerful and very strong person. He may have had some frustrations, in a way. He was an engineer. He had some interest in my work . . . [Interruption: ringing telephone]

ROBERT BROWN: You said the black community in Boston was scattered, and it was fairly small, but you were just beginning to tell me how it was highly structured in social terms.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Well, we had the equivalent of "the blue book," you might say, which was made up of professional people. My dad could qualify for that and some people got after him. But Dad was a bit of a loner. He didn't seem to take much to "this social business," in a way. And probably I've inherited a little bit of that from him, I don't know.

ROBERT BROWN: On the other hand, was your mother a would-be "joiner?" Did she like clubs and other such activities?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes and no. She was very much into the church, the Episcopal church; and she did work in the Shaw House, the settlement house. She did a lot of work there. But she wasn't one of these people to join a whole lot of clubs -- the only clubs she was [in] was the mother's club at the Shaw House. Then of course she worked in the Episcopal church. She was a person of extraordinary intellectual curiosity. She went over to Harvard University and became involved in the extension courses over there. She went there for about half a century, as a matter of fact, attending lectures and things like that. She never took exams, and some of the professors were a little bit exasperated with her [laughing] because they wanted her to take exams. But she had kind of a psychological block there. Anyhow, she got after me and I went over to the extension courses. I got my degree of Bachelor of Arts in extension studies in 1968. I'm still associated with the extension studies at Harvard through the Library. So, in a way, the name of Crite has been associated with the Extension School at Harvard University for practically its entire existence. Which is a record of some sorts, I guess.

ROBERT BROWN: How was regular school itself, when you were a child -- was that a big part of your childhood?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, the same part as any other child, I guess.

ROBERT BROWN: Was it something you liked?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Laughing] It was something I tolerated, just like any other youngster, I should imagine.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, being something of a loner, I guess you maybe didn't like very much being around so many other people.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, when I used the term "loner," that didn't mean I was anti-social. I had a certain preoccupation because I was drawing. So I was a loner from the standpoint of an observer. But that didn't mean I was anti-social -- I had a whole lot of friends, I still do, as a matter of fact. I have a relatively active life, and anybody looking at my guestbook-diary -- usually people remark, when sometimes I say that I'm a lonesome old man, "You can't prove it by this." [Both laugh] They say, "You have more visitors than any two people." And of course, that's what happens. A lot of young people come and I'm working with them on projects. Like last night I was working on a slide-tape presentation this girl has to make relative to what you might call a study of the South End -- rather, a study of Columbus Avenue. So she was synchronizing slides with her tape. I have some equipment here.

ROBERT BROWN: You're really able to contribute to that?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You went to the Children's Art Center here in the South End.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. I went there when I was about 10 or 11 or 12. what happened then was, one of my teachers at the School -- her name was Miss Brady -- she got hold of my mother and said that "this boy has some talent, you ought to take him over to the Children's Art Center," which had just started up then. That's at 36 Rutland Street. It was started, I think, by a Mrs. Perkins, Elizabeth Ward [?] Perkins, and also a Mr. Charles Herbert Woodbury, who's a famous watercolorist . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: A very well-known painter.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, he was.

ROBERT BROWN: Were they the teachers?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, they were more or less the founders, you might say, of the Art Center. Mr. Woodbury did have some few of us out to his studio, and we made some drawings from movies. It was of they were trying.

ROBERT BROWN: You mean you'd sit in a movie and make drawings while it was on?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. They had what is called a daylight screen, I guess. They had movies of animals and things so we could make some drawings from that.

ROBERT BROWN: What was the intention of that, do you suppose?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE To sharpen our vision.

ROBERT BROWN: You had to work fast, didn't you?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE More or less, yes. I just vaguely remember that. But we used to make trips up to the Isabel Stewart/Jack Gardner palace. I remember going there. Of course, the collection they have there is just a blaze of color, the courtyard. I made several drawings. One of them was sent to Mrs. Gardner and she was rather pleased -- she was still alive at the time, this was before 1924 (I think she died that year). My mother tells me -- she came out with a group of children from the Art Center, and Mrs. Gardner saw her and asked her to come in and sit down and have a cup of tea with her, so she did. That's one of those little pleasant incidents -- sitting and having tea with this rather fabulous woman. My mother recalls that she seemed rather sad. I suppose Mrs. Gardner may have had her moments of sadness -- I think she lost her only child; she was incapable of children. And the palace was, I suppose, a kind of substitute, in a way. But, at any rate, it was my introduction to the place. And, as I said before, I just remember this blaze of glory, of color, of flowers and the streaming down in the courtyard; and then of course the mysterious nooks and corners, with bits of Italian paintings and carvings . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: You were saying you were struck by the color . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, that's what I remember.

ROBERT BROWN: Your mother had been taking you, at an even earlier age, to the Museum of Fine Arts too, is that right?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. I practically grew up in the place.

ROBERT BROWN: You mean you'd go there like on a Saturday after school . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, Saturday and Sunday classes in drawing. Then, of course, I went there with my mother -- she took me there often in a baby carriage. All I just remember is the Museum was there, and I was there, and, as I said before, I practically grew up there.

ROBERT BROWN: When you were a little fellow with your mother, would you spend quite a lot of time there, do you think -- several hours?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I can't remember that . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Well, when you were a bit older, did you . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Then of course I went on my own. I went to the classes . . . they had children's classes.

ROBERT BROWN: Who taught those, do you remember?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Laughing] Gosh, you're talking about, what, 50 years ago.

ROBERT BROWN: Were they pretty good classes?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You learned quite a lot?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, I did. Then of course I went to the high school vocational art classes, which were held in the Museum. I remember some of my teachers there -- there was a Miss Labreck [phon. sp.], she was still alive; and then there was Miss Alice J. Morse [phon. sp.]; and quite a few others. I think Miss Morse was connected with the Museum school. Through the high school vocational art classes I did get a scholarship to the Museum school. It came at a kind of interesting time. I had been admitted to the Yale School of Art and so forth, which was rather surprised at my scholarship -- my marks in the college board exams were rather poor; they were very poor, as a matter of fact.

ROBERT BROWN: Was this . . . when? The Late 20's?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, 1929.

ROBERT BROWN: Had you gone down to Yale to look it over?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, did the whole thing by correspondence. I got my letter of admission, by sending in my records and At that time I got a scholarship to the Museum school, so I voted to go to the Museum school. And it was rather lucky that I did, because if I'd gone down to Yale I'd have had a problem, because my dad took ill, and that sort of shock [Transcriber's note: New Englanders customarily call a "stroke" a "shock".], shock with cerebral hemorrhage -- a massive cerebral hemorrhage -- should have killed him but it didn't; it disabled him. So Mother and I had about 210 pounds of man to deal with for sever years. He died in '37. So I stayed at the Museum school on scholarships.

ROBERT BROWN: Because you'd had these Saturday classes, did you get to begin a little ahead of the people who came in green? At the Museum school?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Laughing] Nobody came to the Museum school green.

ROBERT BROWN: Most of them had had some training?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. These people are screened to go into the school. Everybody who went to that school had some talent.

ROBERT BROWN: What were you required to do when you began there, do you remember? It was a long program, wasn't it?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I remember some charcoal drawing of statues. Then after that we did some life drawings.

ROBERT BROWN: What did you enjoy most?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [After some hesitancy] I liked the whole business. Of course, the charcoal drawing was a bit dreary, because I'd had several years of cast drawing before. Then of course it got into life drawings.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you enjoy that -- you liked that more than the drawing from plaster casts?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, naturally, doing something which is living. I took two courses -- the course in Drawing & Painting, and also the course in Design. So I completed two courses at the school -- they're two separate things; I got a diploma in either course.

ROBERT BROWN: What did Design consist of, then?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Industrial design, fabrics, interiors . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Who were some of your fellow students at the school? Were there some of them that you've kept up with that stuck with art?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE As a matter of fact I haven't kept up with hardly any of them. There's only one person -- Ralph Rosenthal, who was at one time head of the art department in the school system in Boston, I believe. He just recently retired. Some of the others I haven't seen hardly at all. Edna Hibble: I hear about her but I haven't seen her. I think she has a gallery on Newbury Street. And there's a chap, Victor Mullo [phon. sp.], I used to see him every once in a while -- he was a guard at -- was it the Jack Gardner Palace, or the Museum?

ROBERT BROWN: He'd been a student at the art school?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Some of the others [He mentions 3 names, two unclear to attempt].

ROBERT BROWN: Were you fairly close to some of the teachers?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes and no. I mean, to some of the teachers I was. When I first went there, there was a chap named Philip Hale, he was head of the Painting department, and I think he was the son of Edward Everett Hale, the famous author. Philip Hale was quite a character.

ROBERT BROWN: In what way?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, he was sort of brusque; a rather kindly sort of person, but he was of the old academic school. Then when he joined his ancestors, we had a couple of teachers from the Slade School in London, I think a Mr. Guthrie, a Mr. Burns. They held forth in the painting dept. for about four years. After they left, we had a rather exciting person by the name of Alexander Yakovlev [phon. sp.]. He was an arts anthropologist. Russian-born. And this type of drawing was something like Botticelli, only just translated into modern terms. He had a great deal of virtuosity -- he could make a full-size life drawing in about a couple of hours. We would just stand around watching open-mouthed. He wandered all over the place -- he'd come back from these different expeditions: back from the Gobi Desert, or North Africa; and bring back portfolios of drawings of the Tuaregs and other peoples of North Africa or some of the people in Tibet or something like that. I think he was with the first Sitran [phon. sp.] motorcade across the Sahara; this was back in the 30's, of course. He died unexpectedly of cancer, on the operating table. He was a relatively young man then, probably in his 50's.

At any rate, I was there during his regime and I left during his regime. The experience was extraordinary. I had the experience of actually going to three different schools while still in the same building, and under three different regimes and three different disciplines. I think all the artists, all the students who had that particular experience did rather well for themselves.

ROBERT BROWN: You mean you feel it was very useful to have had this breadth of training and outlook?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. The school itself was going through quite a few changes at the time.

ROBERT BROWN: How did the two men from England teach? What was their approach?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, they were very precise, and a great deal of detail. As far as color was concerned, there were sober, quiet colors, as I recall.

ROBERT BROWN: Did Yakovlev put the emphasis on drawing?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, yes. His coloring was rather sober in many ways; he'd go in for more or less quiet colors, as I recall. But in his conte crayon drawings, they were very bold and very striking.

ROBERT BROWN: What sort of things were you doing by the end of your time there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, making illustrations for spirituals -- black-and-white brush drawings. And then, of course, documentaries of black and white people, just as ordinary human beings. See, back there in the 30's, the concept of blacks was usually of somebody up in Harlem, or the sharecropper from the deep south, or what you might call the jazz Negro. There was a sort of Harlem Renaissance going on. But the ordinary person -- you might say middle-class -- you just didn't hear about them. So what I did in my drawings was just to try to do the life of people as I saw them round about me; in the streets, and a sort of neighborhood painting scenes. They turned out to be historic, because what I did, I painted these various streets which of course have vanished. A whole way of life has vanished. Now I find the paintings have considerable value as documents.

ROBERT BROWN: But you were, even then, attracting the attention of other artists, weren't you? And collectors? You mentioned that through the architect Walter Kellum [phon. sp.] you became involved with the Society of Independent Artists here in Boston.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Could you describe that a bit?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. There was this Society of Independent Artists. They had an annual, non-juried show, as a way of introducing newer talent to the art public. The exhibitions were of course uneven -- you had some sub-professional and some professional work. They had the exhibitions in a place called a bar on Joy/Joyce Street. Walter Kellum became interested in my work and, as a matter of fact, I worked up at his farm-estate for about a year or so, a lot of it in one summer.

ROBERT BROWN: In New Hampshire.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. In Tamworth. He suggested I join the Boston Society, so I did. I received a very favorable interview, rather, a review, of my work -- I think it was about 1929 or 30, no, it was later than that, around the 30's. It was a painting called "I'm Settling the World's Problems." That was reviewed by the distinguished art critic, Mr. Cochran [phon. sp.] of the Boston Transcript. Usually, when he introduced you to the art world, you had it made, as it were.

ROBERT BROWN: What was it in that painting that struck him? What was the painting about?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well it was just a group of people sitting in a park, Madison Park as a matter of fact, discussing the world's problems. The painting has been lost. I sold it during the Depression and I don't know where it is now. The only record I have of it is the newspaper clips of it. What I did recently is to take the newspaper clips and reconstruct the drawing and made it into an offset print on which I did some watercoloring. So I have what you might call an offset print/watercolor. That's on exhibit now at Government House exhibit now, from Jan. 14 through February 10.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you get to know some other, perhaps slightly older artists, through the Society of Independent Artists?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. I sort of ran into quite a few of them.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you become fairly friendly or close to some of them?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Not really. There were people whom I know -- I'm trying to remember their names. One person, I think, by the name of Pepper . . . ?

ROBERT BROWN: Charles Holly [?] Pepper? That would be a much older man.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE And then there was another artist named Hopkinson, I think.

ROBERT BROWN: Charles Hopkinson?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Both have bought some of my things, as time went on. And the Grace Horn [?] Galleries became interested. As a matter of fact, they became my semi-patrons, in a way; I don't say handled my work. Back in those days, for an artist to be on Newbury Street, where the Grace Horn Galleries was, was unusual, and I think I was probably the only black artist who had any gallery working for him at that time.

ROBERT BROWN: Were there many other black artists, though, at that time here?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Very, very few. As a matter of fact, the only professional black artist I can recall back in those days is a chap by the name of Romaine Lipman/Litman [sp?].

ROBERT BROWN: Being black, would that have been an impediment to your getting into these galleries? On Newbury Street, at that time?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE That I wouldn't know. I would assume that it might be. The only thing that I know is that the Grace Horn Galleries did have me, and that black artists are conspicuous by their absence. There just weren't very many of them. The situation was much different then than today -- today we have a plethora, you might say, of very talented black artists in the city. And, as a matter of fact, there's a good possibility that we might have a Boston Renaissance somewhat similar to the Harlem Renaissance, the difference being that the Harlem Renaissance was more supported by the government because that was during the WPA period. And it was more or less literary. And the Boston Renaissance, should it come, would be more in the graphic arts. And I think that Northeastern University with its artist-in-residence program, and they give them all that studio space up on Leon [?] Street, is one of the most exciting things that's happening.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you work with Grace Horn at her gallery?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Well, I think Grace Horn herself had probably retired, but the gallery carried her name.

ROBERT BROWN: Who did you work with there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE The person who ran the gallery was named, I think, Margaret Brown. She's gone to her reward.

ROBERT BROWN: Yes, who later had her own gallery. Do you recall her, or the other people? Would they come to your studio to look and see what you had done? Or did you take things over there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I took things over to the Grace Horn Gallery. Now, this Margaret Brown I refer to is not the Margaret Brown the painter . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: I know. The gallery-owner.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE There's another person by the name of Rideout [sp?], and one other person's name I can't recall. All of them have gone to their reward.

ROBERT BROWN: You submitted things to that gallery over a number of years.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. They gave me several one-man shows. These are the neighborhood paintings. One of them was sold. I didn't sell very many things. During the same period, I put out a couple of books . . . I made the drawings for the books which were later published by Harvard University Press. That took place 1944 and '48.

ROBERT BROWN: Your drawings . . . from spirituals were done in the 1930's?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Were they published . . . were they done . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No. You see, the drawings of the spirituals were done in '36, in the '30's. They weren't published until the '40's. It was quite a formative period, I guess. I was going through several changes.

ROBERT BROWN: You mean changes in your style, or in the . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Outlook, I guess. I went through what you might call a Catholic revival. You'd understand that if one would look into the history of the Anglican Church. You note there was a period of Catholic Revival that took place in the 1830's. In a sense I went through a similar kind of experience. I was a "low churchman" and of course I became a "high churchman." I don't like the terms, but anyway, I guess that's the best way of describing it.

ROBERT BROWN: Why? You find the terms are kind of meaningless?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE They're meaningless today.

ROBERT BROWN: Did this mean that you became much more devout, or much more concerned with liturgy?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, I became much more interested in liturgy. It was very useful, because it gave me a framework of discipline within which to do my work. So I used that, for example, as the frame of discipline to illustrate the spirituals, by making use of the liturgy, the vestments, and everything like that -- using the vestments and appurtenances as, you might say, a vocabulary.

ROBERT BROWN: You wrote about that -- those illustrated spirituals -- in 1938. You said you did them to express a sense of an absolute faith in God "which made it possible for my people to worship," and so forth -- to carry on their life. You feel that the spirituals did that, or had done that, at least?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. You see, spirituals are a form of oral tradition. And so it enables people to know something about the Bible, folks who didn't have the opportunity to learn how to read. And then the other things, of course, about the spirituals is that they were used sort of like a code. If was going to escape, or something like that, you'd use the spirituals in that way. The River Jordan might be the Ohio River, something like that. There were several purposes. And then of course the music was an idea of fighting against the impersonality of slavery, or rather the de-personalization in an institution such as slavery. We could use the spirit of the spiritual today, because this age of technology that we have is non-human in many ways. We need to have something to express our humanity. The message of the spirituals was really just that, so it goes beyond an incident in history which we call "slavery," as far as this country is concerned.

ROBERT BROWN: Were your parents interested in spirituals, things of that sort? Was this a product of your own study, or was it naturally around you in church or in jazz forms? Or course, you differ, I think - - you've said that jazz is not spirituals . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, they're not. The resemblance between the two is the element of syncopation that one might get. But the spirituals served a definite purpose. As far as their being in the church is concerned, of course you don't get spirituals in the Anglican Church. You get that more in some of the evangelical churches.

ROBERT BROWN: You're familiar with them, too? You'd go to them?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, occasionally. I never heard the spirituals in a real setting. They used to have these huge camp meeting grounds in a place called Darby, in the outskirts of Philadelphia. These camp meetings were huge affairs -- you'd get a choir of about a thousand people singing these spirituals. This was back around the turn of the century.

ROBERT BROWN: This was when your mother was growing up down there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. These people, of course, a lot of them had had the experience of slavery -- this was around 1910. People around 70 or 80 would have had that experience. So, therefore, the way they sang was much different than today. When you have a choir of about a thousand people singing these, you get a much different impression than you do today on a concert stage of something else that is more or less "devised," you might say.

ROBERT BROWN: Through the '30's now, -- I know in the '40's you began a long term of employment with the Navy. Before that, how were you supporting yourself? You were living with your mother?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. My mother had work. Dad was knocked out, of course. She had work. And, of course, I supported my schooling mostly on scholarships. My mother was criticized by a lot of people who'd say, "I'd take that boy out of school and put him to work." On a short-term basis, of course, they were correct. On a long-term basis, they couldn't be more wrong. I've earned my living by drawing, though I haven't earned my living as an artist in the limited sense, QUOTE/UNQUOTE. But I've earned my living by drawing. As an illustrator in the Navy Dept., of course, I had to use all the skills that I had learned in school.

ROBERT BROWN: In the '30's, after you were out of school, did you work somewhere for those few years?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Well, I tried getting some work -- this was around '36, '37 . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: The Depression was still bad.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. But by that time the war in Europe had started. They were getting into war work here. So I went into Civil Service, in the Navy. First I was of course at the Geodetic Survey. Then they transferred to Washington and I was transferred to the Navy Yard and stayed there for the duration.

ROBERT BROWN: What sort of work did you do there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE First, I started as a draftsman. So I did a great deal of that. Then, as time went on, the engineers found out I could draw so they had me drawing. So if they got ideas of propulsion systems or anything like that, they'd come to me to make a perspective drawing. So I had to be well-acquainted with machinery and everything like that. They kept me busy doing that.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you find that pretty interesting?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. It made me feel less schizophrenic [laughing] and I was the only person in the department that could do it. I could pretty well call my own shots. It was helpful. I looked upon my work in the Navy Dept. as a means towards an end of promoting myself as an artist. It gave me a more secure financial basis, in a way. It really helped me a great deal.

ROBERT BROWN: You still had plenty of energy after you were through work to do your own . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, yes. I lived a relatively disciplined life, I guess, in that way. Then, of course, I was busy with lectures on liturgical art. They would give me time off to go off and do these various things for the church and stuff like that.

ROBERT BROWN: How did you become a lecturer on liturgical art? Was this because of your interest in liturgy?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I am a liturgical artist.

ROBERT BROWN: Did the Episcopal Church ask you to lecture? How did this come about?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I'd give talks in different parishes. They'd have exhibitions in the parishes and schools. There was a strong movement towards liturgical art in both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, so I was tied up in that through Mrs. Perkinson [?], who was a Roman Catholic. So I came into contact with such people as and people like that. And back in those days, the . They were more or less interested in the English school of artists who were interested in liturgical art -- Eric Gill, people like that. So I was right in the middle of all that. We had a sort of liturgical art store . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Here in Boston?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. I think it was the St. Botolph group to start off. I was very much involved in all of this. Then I became acquainted with Bryan Bush [?]. Then with McGinnis & Walsh . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Some of the big decorating and architectural, liturgical and ecclesiastical . . . . How did you . . . ? You began working in New York City for Arambush (Ambush [?]) Decorating Company. How did that come about? Did they contact you, or did they see examples of your work?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, they contacted me. It came at a rather fortunate time because I was laid off at the Navy Yard . . . it was just at the close of the War and there was a great reduction-in-force. So Arambush had me come down there. I worked in New York for about 14 months. Then, when I got through there, then the Navy called me back.

ROBERT BROWN: So you always had this cushion. Had you worked for companies -- for architectural firms before this? Was this a new experience?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, it was a new experience.

ROBERT BROWN: How did you go about it? Would you consult a lot regularly with people at Arambush?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, I worked right in the company. For example, they'd get these commissions -- I did this mural decoration for St. Augustine's Church in Brooklyn . . . .

[TAPE APPEARS TO STOP, THEN RESUME]

ROBERT BROWN: Back to the work with Arambush Decorating Co., had you done . . . ? This was a very large mural, about 345 feet square, that you did for St. Augustine's Church in Brooklyn. Had you done mural work before?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, I hadn't. [Laughing] And I was scared to death when I did this one.

ROBERT BROWN: That's an immense project.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, it is. The largest thing I ever did -- the largest single thing I ever did. That Church was destroyed by fire in 1972.

ROBERT BROWN: How did you set about it? Did you have the benefit of skilled workmen from the Company to assist you in . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, they gave me advice. I made several sketches and these were shown to the client. After that, I made scale drawings, and then I made a full-scale cartoon right in the office itself. Then they built a scaffolding at the Church, and then I went to work on the painting itself. I had to do the work all by myself. It took me about 38 days, actually, to do with painting -- adding all the times together. The total job probably took me about 80 days -- the research, preliminary sketches, and so forth. I did have a background, of course, of information because of all the classical studies and everything else that I had done in school, museums, etc. That wasn't a problem. I did a little bit of research on St. Augustine himself, getting points of his life, and so on.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you find him an appealing subject?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. Challenging. After all, making a painting of a man 21 feet high is rather challenging. That was not the only thing I did with Arambush, however. Another thing I did was a ceiling, a baldocchino ceiling for the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, D.C.

ROBERT BROWN: A baldocchino ceiling? Painted on canvas?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh no. I made up a design, and then the design was executed in cooper wire and then painted. So the person looking up at the ceiling from the altar would get the impression of cloisonné enamel. The pillars were designed and executed by a fellow named Gleb Derujinsky. The Monastery is something of a shrine in Washington.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you work with Derujinsky?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: What was he like to work with?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Very friendly. I judge from his name he was Russian. He was a very friendly sort of person. The staff at Arambush, they were all skilled craftsmen. There was a sort of no-nonsense kind of business about it, and you really had to know your business. He didn't know it, and [Laughing] they knew it and they let him know it. The mural dept. is headed up by a German, I've forgotten his name. He really gave me a very rough time.

ROBERT BROWN: Why? He didn't think you were skilled enough?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE That's the feeling I had. He sort of made me feel my place, [He laughs] in a sense. I was rather awed, in a way, because I was surrounded by all these highly skilled and developed people. I think most of them were Europeans. With that type of people you really have to know your business. They don't take anything less than excellence. It was very good training. I couldn't wish for anything better. It was rough going through it, but I look back at it with a bit of nostalgia in many ways.

ROBERT BROWN: Then you did a project, also for them, in Detroit. Was that another mural?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, it was. I was back in the Navy Dept. when I did that. I took about a couple of weeks off - rather, took one week off. The first week I spent at home to get acquainted with the medium -- it was casein color. I made full-scale drawings. Then I flew out to Detroit and closeted myself in this particular chapel of the Oblate Order of the sisters of Providence. And I made these 14 stations paintings in less than a week. It was a very enjoyable experience -- it was something like a Retreat for me. The Sisters said their offices in English, and there is a sufficient amount of relation between the Anglican and the Roman so that I could more or less get the feeling of it. Every morning I went to Mass at the parish church, the Catholic parish church. Then I went directly from there to the convent. So it was practically a week's Retreat for me. And also I did a set of Stations in metal for Chapel in Washington. Then, also, the farmed another job to me -- stained glass for an Order, I think it's the Holy Family, in New Orleans, a Novitiate and a Mother House of a particular order. I did the work here in Boston, as far as that chapel was concerned. And the Stations -- I did that work in Boston. That was something which the people farmed out to me. Probably, if I'd lived a little closer -- I was living in New Haven or somewhere like that -- they'd have sent more work out to me, but living in Boston it was just a little bit too far away.

ROBERT BROWN: In the 1940's, you had begun publication . . . I think they were mostly based on spirituals or the liturgy, weren't they? "Were You There?" published by Harvard in 1944, and then in 1948 they published something called "Three Spirituals."

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: And then the, I think, Hyde Episcopal Society of St. John the Evangelist, 1948, published "All Glory."

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Which reminds me, I'm supposed to send out 25 [?] copies of that book. somebody in Hartford; I just got a little letter reminding me.

ROBERT BROWN: These consisted of illustrations of spirituals or portions of the liturgical service . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, those are two separate things altogether.

ROBERT BROWN: Why don't we take them in order?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE What I do with the spirituals is just take a hymn and break it down in its different phrases and just illustrate each phrase. In other words, I just tell the story of the words through pictures. In the book for the Society of St. John the Evangelist, I just took the Prayer of Consecration that we follow in the Anglican service, or mass, whatever, and illustrated that. I think it took about 20 drawings to do it. [Laughing] It took quite a bit of doing because it's one thing to go to mass and hear the prayer day in and day out, but then to sit down to visualize it -- that takes something else. One of the people at Harvard, Professor Kenneth Conant (no relation to the president) was an interesting person. He was a member of the Orthodox Church, I guess Greek Orthodox. Anyhow, he was interested in my work and he introduced me to Mr. Scaife [sp?], who was the editor of Harvard Press and the father, I believe of Bishop Scaife, of New York, I think, I can't remember offhand -- he's retired now anyhow but still with us. Conant suggested I illustrate the Prayer of Consecration. I did, and the drawings which I did are what you might call first-draft drawings. I intended to do the series over again, refining the drawings; I never did. [Laughing] It probably was just as well because the drawings have a certain amount of freshness and spontaneity, I imagine, that the first-draft thing would have.

ROBERT BROWN: Conant said, "We'll take them as is?"

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. He said he would talk to the Society of St. John the Evangelist. And they got them published, I think it was by Shea [?] Brothers. They were fairly successful.

ROBERT BROWN: This was work that you thought was quite important to do?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. Of course, I think the work I do is important for me. [Laughing] It was just another phase of my work.

ROBERT BROWN: Although you have had, now, these commissions for this sort of thing, and also the work with Rambush [?], by and large even those things, the commissions, have been in areas that are of great interest to you, aren't they?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You've been fortunate in that way, haven't you?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I guess so, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You continued this work in the 50's when you did . . . I think by 1955 you got a multilith press which brought you into doing large and cheaply and expeditiously editions of your prints. Is that correct?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. What I did then, I started making bulletins for the church. When I first started, I used -- I can't think of the chap's name now -- he was a master printer and worked on a multilith press. So, at first I'd make up the drawings and he'd run them off on his press. Later on, I was able to use a small press at the St. John's Church, which was a Model 80, and we ran off the bulletins there. Then I was able to acquire my own press, a 1250, the machine that I have now. So that enabled me to do my own printing. A friend of mine thought that I should have my own equipment. I was wondering, "Gee, where in the world can I get it?" Even a factory-built press back in the 50's cost in the neighborhood of $1,900. What happened was that the Jesuits [?] were changing their 1250 for something else, so we picked it up on a trade-in, and I got it for less than $500. That was really a lucky break. It's an old machine -- as a matter of fact, it had D.C. motors when I picked it up, so I had A.C. motors put in, and so forth. And even today, when servicemen come to work on the machine, they say, "Boy, this is an old-timer. You hang on to it!"

ROBERT BROWN: Had you done much printing before that? Making your own prints?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No. I did some work on a mimeo graph machine, but the only printing I'd done prior to that was of linoleum blocks; which I still do. The offset press is, of course, lithography. So fairly recently I've been doing these sort of documentaries on the offset press, because we're making these in limited editions.

ROBERT BROWN: That's this press you got in 1955?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you find it, as opposed to, say, linoleum block or woodcut or something that you'd done earlier, that this multilith was a much freer medium? You can sort of draw?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, it is a freer medium for me to use, so it's just another medium, it just enlarges me . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: And you enjoy them all?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: And you enjoy the more laborious as well as the less laborious?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Each has its own particular area of discipline. So one is not a substitute for another, it's just another addition to my arsenal, you might say.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you think . . . is there a certain subject matter you prefer to do in lithograph as opposed to linoleum block, or painting?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE With linoleum block I do the ecclesiastical things; it fits more or less in that. I did do one or two secular things in linoleum but for me it isn't that type of medium. When I used linoleum, I used to think in terms of doing liturgical themes. With the multilith press, of course, I do liturgical things -- I've been doing these church bulletins -- but then I do other things -- secular things, etc. I've been going out into the streets and making drawings using the plate as a drawing pad, so I can make my drawings right on the spot. I did a whole series of things in the South End, and I've been doing some things down in "the combat zone" [where prostitutes openly pick up customers] which I've found a very interesting area in many ways, and I've done quite a few sketches down there. I can take this thing all around with me and make my drawings right on the spot. Then I come back and work on my drawings a lot more, for my press. I could run off about two or three thousand but of that type of drawing I purposely limit an edition to about 30 or 40 prints. Of course, with the church bulletins, I run off an average of 1,200 or so per Sunday, because I'm serving several parishes. About three here, one in Oregon, a couple out in Michigan, one in Washington, D.C. Sometimes I serve more, sometimes less.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you find that the linoleum block, or the woodcut, is a more rigid form, isn't it? Do you find that it lends itself to more abstract liturgical or ecclesiastical art than does the lithograph?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I suppose so.

ROBERT BROWN: I don't know whether I mean to say abstract -- it's more simplified. I can see your wood blocks are much more simplified than are your lithographs.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, it would have to be, because that's the nature of the material. Now, there's one thing: I've only done a few woodcuts, very few, but I've done quite a few linoleums. They look alike in many ways, as one looks at them . . .

ROBERT BROWN: They do look very much alike.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE . . . the techniques are similar. The only difference is that linoleum is a little bit softer than wood, and I like it because I can work faster.

ROBERT BROWN: Have you always worked fairly fast?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE That's what people seem to say. I do work quickly-- if you're making drawings out in the street, you do have to work rather quickly. Even when I make my watercolors and drawings outside, I work very quickly. I wasn't too aware of this until fairly recently. I'd been doing some life drawings here at the house -- this has been a recent development; I've always done life drawings, for a long period, but from 1944 to '77 I didn't do any, because there wasn't any opportunity unless I went to an art school. But now I've been able to have some of my friends come pose for me here at the house, different girls. I make life drawings of myself as far as male models are concerned. But they impressed me with the fact that I work so quickly. [Laughing] It never occurred to me to even think about it. The average drawing that I make of the girls would probably take about 20 minutes or something like that. If I make a portrait study, that might take a little longer. But it's very quick.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you think this goes back to the way you were trained at the museum school? Or do you think it's to your own credit -- that you always had a facility with drawing?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Because you did have to do a lot of quick sketches and memory sketches at the museum school, no doubt.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, I probably did. But the thing is, at the museum school they didn't stress speed. That was just something that was part of my own makeup. I've known some other artists who worked exactly the opposite -- they take a long time to develop their themes, etc. It just so happens that in my particular case I can work rather quickly, but that would have nothing to do with the training in school.

ROBERT BROWN: Although they did have that type of drawing, didn't they? In the life class there? It wasn't, probably, stressed -- the main emphasis was on a very finished . . . .

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. That's the way it was in the days when I went to school. We did have one person who did some line drawings -- what are called "construction drawings," trying to express as much as you could with as few lines as possible. There was a great deal of that.

ROBERT BROWN: You'd done, as a young boy, some stick drawings, I believe, that caught the attention of . . . there are some at the Addison Gallery in Andover.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. They're sort of stick-men drawings. The interesting thing about the drawings -- about my drawing in general -- is how little change there is in one sense. The compositions that I did at the age of 10 or 12, basically it's the same thing today. Of course, I've developed, but I mean there's a great deal of . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: What was there that you wanted to achieve by your compositions that seems to have stuck with you? Do you notice some kind of emphasis, or . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I don't know. It's probably just something like handwriting. It's a certain style, I guess -- the way I massed my figures, the way I arranged things when I was a child, and still do.

[END OF SIDE 1, TAPE 1]

[TAPE 1, SIDE 2]

ROBERT BROWN: This is the second interview with Alan Crite, in Boston, Massachusetts, March 1, 1979, Robert Brown the interviewer.

ROBERT BROWN: We're looking right now at some childhood work, I think, beginning in the early 1920's. You were, I think, working on your own, weren't you? And to some extent, then, you were going to the Children's Art Center in the South End. Why don't we talk about this first one, which is a drawing colored with color pencil, I think. It's like a street scene . . . .

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE It is. I think I wrote on it -- it's from Brookline Street on Shawmut Avenue to 395 Shawmut Avenue, "Winter Scene in November 1930" and I signed my name "Alan Crite." In this drawing is the South End Branch of the Boston Public Library. My house is at 401 Shawmut Avenue. All of this is written down.

ROBERT BROWN: You show the building, but there are no figures in it or, if there are, they are very minuscule. What were you, about 10 years old there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You're interested in the buildings, their rooflines, I notice. This is viewed head-on. You're interested in the profile of the roofs, the openings, and any elaborate decoration around the entrances.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. I stood across the street and made this drawing. The church is in the center here, or sort of right center; and that was the South End Branch of the Library. There used to be an Armenian church -- I think originally it was a Congregational church. This church and the two buildings on both sides form almost an architectural unit.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you think you were aware of that as a 10-year-old, when you drew it? A very pleasing . . . you liked the buildings?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. [Laughing] Well, I lived there. You see, I lived at 401 Shawmut Ave. and I also practically lived in the Library, right next door. So it meant a great deal to me, a part of my formative period, you might say.

ROBERT BROWN: I suppose it isn't possible to recall at this date, but what was your intention by this drawing? To show your parents? to make an accurate record of something around you?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, I just wanted to make the drawing. I liked to draw, so I liked to draw things round about me. So, it was a record . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: But you had a sheer delight in drawing.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I enjoyed doing it. It was a way of telling a story and so forth. This drawing was lost -- I came across it two or three years ago. It was a bit of a shock, in a way, to see it, because I'd forgotten I'd ever made the drawing. So it gave me a very vivid picture of that particular period in my life. Because, today, 401 Shawmut Avenue still exists, but the church, and 395 have been destroyed. The building on the left still exists. So I only have this drawing to give me some idea of an early scene of my childhood.

ROBERT BROWN: This next one is, similarly, pencil, colored in, and it's another streetscape but much more complex. We're looking through end buildings down the backs of streets -- alleyways, I suppose. And, again, was your intention here more or less the same? This is a very familiar or local neighborhood?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. You see, what I did here, I just crossed the street and I turned around and I looked at this open lot, which was right off 401 Shawmut Avenue. This building on the right-hand side, the back view of it, that used to be a convent. Then you have this open lot here. I think at one time there was a fire station which of course wasn't in existence when I made this particular drawing.

ROBERT BROWN: The neighborhood generally, though, was very built-up, was it? A lot such as you're looking at here in the foreground was the exception, was it? A vacant lot?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, it was.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you like this environment?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Laughing] Oh sure, I lived there.

ROBERT BROWN: As a child, it was a pleasant place?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, you see, in the wintertime . . . this happened to be a winter scene, I think I called it "winter scene opposite 401 Shawmut Avenue, snowing, Nov. 21, 1920" -- I'm glad I wrote down these dates. [Both laugh]

ROBERT BROWN: You were very concerned even then about being precise about . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Not as much as I should [Laughs] but occasionally I did.

ROBERT BROWN: The colors here are quite bright -- yellows, greens, the red of the brick.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I tried an experiment: I used both of these drawings as the base for making a reconstruction of the area.

ROBERT BROWN: You mean recently you did this?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Just sort of as a recollection of my childhood. It was a strange experience, because I felt as though I was going back -- you see, this is 1978, and it's going back almost half a century, or more than that, recalling all the things which took place. There's a little bit of the elevated over here on the right-hand side; you can just make that out. Of course, as I look at this drawing, I think of horse carriages, and the Holy Cross Cathedral is right nearby. And I think the Prince and Princess of Belgium came and heard Mass at the Cathedral. I think it was celebrated by Cardinal O'Connell. It was a big "do," in those days.

ROBERT BROWN: Some of the vivid memories. The next thing you have here says, "To Dad from Alan, Christmas 1921." It looks like a medieval page or person blowing a trumpet with a banner on it. How did you get this idea?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE It's a copy.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you do a lot of copying from illustrations in books and magazines?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. I did that because it's good training. I made up this book for Dad -- I have the rest of the book in my hand. As a matter of fact, I made up two books. One was birds and animals, and the other was, I guess, general things. The birds and animals book was partially destroyed but the drawings are preserved and are now in the possession of the Museum of the National Center for Afro-American Art in Boston.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you doing this for your dad because you wanted him to know what you were doing? Did he encourage you to do this? He was an engineer . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, he was an engineer?

ROBERT BROWN: Was he interested in your doing this art work? You were now an 11-year-old boy . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, he thought I was pretty clever. He was interested. He had one experience with me, though. I made a drawing of an automobile and I didn't show any spokes in the wheels of the car, so he thought he'd help me out and put in the spokes in the wheels. And I looked at him rather reproachfully . . . . I said, "Dad, what did you stop my car for?" [Both laugh] And he said that finished him as far as . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Ha ha! Whereas he, as an engineer, was intent on showing every little part that he knew to be in the thing, whereas you were more interested in what it looked like when . . . .

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE It was in motion.

ROBERT BROWN: But he was sympathetic to you and your work.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE To a degree. Later on, when I got into high school, he didn't have quite an understanding of it. But when I got into the museum school, he commenced to see what I was doing. But he did have a problem -- as an engineer, being a practical person; because he shared the attitude that a lot of people have: Can you make a living at it?

ROBERT BROWN: The next thing we're looking at is a pencil drawing, an extraordinary one. It says "Mrs. John Gardner's Court from memory." A drawing of her Fenway Court, at that time still her house -- she died in 1924 -- and now a museum. Comment on this.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I was at the Children's Art Center -- I have another sketch here of the Children's Art Center where I went from about eight to when I was 14 or so, maybe a little later. And so we used to have groups of people growing up from the Art Center to the Gardner palace. So I went there and it made quite an impression -- the color and so on, and I made these memory sketches, of which this is one. And one was sent to Mrs. Gardner, and the report was that she was rather pleased with it. There's a little footnote I suppose I could mention here. My mother went with us -- I think several parents went with the group of us children up to the palace -- and Mrs. Gardner saw my mother and she motioned for her to come in, and so my mother sat down and had tea with this frail little woman. It was quite an experience for my mother. And the impression she had of her was that Mrs. Gardner seemed to be so sad. This was about 1922 or 1923, something like that. I don't know whether her friend Sargent was still alive at the time or not, but I know they were very friendly.

ROBERT BROWN: Did this kind of give a grim feeling to your mother about the place?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, no. She as very much impressed with the color and the beauty of the place. She was also impressed with the graciousness of Mrs. Gardner in having her to tea.

ROBERT BROWN: You seem to have been impressed as a child in this drawing with details of various pieces of sculpture and architecture and all. Is that an accurate assessment? Were you interested in the details?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE From the looks of this drawing, I would say yes. It's pretty good -- I mean, so far as memory is concerned.

ROBERT BROWN: A similar thing is borne out in your drawing, pencil drawing, of the Children's Art Center, and also this part of the old Back Bay Railroad Station, where you show the various architectural parts.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Now, at the Art Center, who did you work with there? Were there regular teachers?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Any artists involved there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Curators were there - I think one was a Miss Bramhall [sp?], another was a Miss Matlack . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Where were they curators from?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE They were curators of the museum. You see, the Children's Art Center was a fine arts museum for children. It was founded, you might say, by Mrs. Elizabeth Ward Perkins.

ROBERT BROWN: Was her friend, the painter, Charles Woodbury . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, he was very much involved. They were very much interested in my work. A group of us children -- if I can remember, I think there was Kohler [?], and there was a Maurice Kaplan in that group -- and we made some drawings of animals for motion pictures. This was an experimental kind of thing. I think we tried that out at Mrs. Perkins' home in Jamaica Plain. So I was practically a charter member of this art center. At the moment of this recording, we're preparing an exhibition of three of us at the art center -- three alumni, you might say. Not the three that I just mentioned; of other people.

ROBERT BROWN: Would Woodbury come around and give some instruction once in a while? Because he was a fine watercolorist.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I think that happened in that particular case -- we went out to Mrs. Perkins' home and made up these drawings. He was the guiding spirit, you might say, behind the arts. I don't recall him going to the art center itself.

ROBERT BROWN: This is looking back . . . you've been told that, and you realize that he was.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: What kind of teaching did you have there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE We had a group of teachers that came in, our teachers, who would give us ideas about drawing and so forth.

ROBERT BROWN: What was their approach -- can you recall?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE This was a museum, as I mentioned before. So we had bits of sculpture -- we had some animal sculptures by Baer/Behr, I think it was, and some other very fine bits and pieces. And then, of course, there were the changing exhibitions, works of various artists, partly from the Newbury Street galleries, or from museums, etc. So we children had good professional examples to look at all the time.

ROBERT BROWN: First-class things were brought to you.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: And then would you be set to drawing from them?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, we'd make drawings from that. Then we'd make imaginary drawings. And all kinds of things -- like, for example, this sketch here of the art center -- I probably sat out in the garden to make this particular drawing.

ROBERT BROWN: That wouldn't be a typical drawing you made at the art center, would it? More typical would be a drawing from a painting or from a piece of sculpture?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No. This would be typical, as far as I'm concerned.

ROBERT BROWN: You were fairly well left to do what you wanted to do. This was a voluntary thing. It was after school hours?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh, yes. But it was directed. We were given instructions as far as drawing and things like that were concerned.

ROBERT BROWN: What were they like? Can you recall how they instructed you?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, in drawing statues, you had to correct your proportions and stuff like that.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you find that interesting?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Some people describe that type of copying -- drawing from a statue or a cast -- as kind of tedious. I suppose that, as a small child, you were pretty curious, weren't you?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, you see, I had the same kind of thing at the Museum. They had children's classes at the Museum.

ROBERT BROWN: At about the same time?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. Like, Saturday drawing class; and I think they had some Sunday drawing classes. I think there still is a children's program at the Museum even today.

ROBERT BROWN: Yes, there is. You've mentioned to me that one teacher you remember was a Miss LeBreck [phon. sp.].

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. She's still alive. She's well along in years and not in the best of health. She was more or less my high school teacher, I mean during the high school period. Also, there was a Miss Brady, who was a teacher in the seventh grade at the Rice [?] School. She was the one who called my mother and said, "This boy knows how to draw; why don't you send him over to the Children's Art Center?" which had just opened.

ROBERT BROWN: This was the Rice Grammar School?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: So Miss Brady was the one who saw this talent. Were you probably drawing an awful lot of the time? Like in school, if you had a little spare time, you'd be possibly making a drawing?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. Then of course in the art classes, I was the star of the place. [Laughs] So Miss Brady was very much impressed. One of the important things about grammar school teachers or primary school teachers -- they're extremely important, I think; these early grades are extremely important. It's through these early grades that the child is introduced into the world in which he's going to live for the rest of his or her life. What kind of introduction he or she has will probably determine a great deal of what's going to happen to him. To make a point of that: when I first started in at public school, we went up to a school in Roxbury, because we lived up at 689 Shawmut Avenue at that time, one of the few times I lived in the Roxbury area. We went to the Lafayette School. I was a rather taciturn individual, so the teacher there thought I was slightly retarded. She wanted to put me in a speech class, so she had me in there -- in the kind of class that today we call for "special children," I guess. [Laughs] My mother wasn't too happy with that but there wasn't too much she could do about that because we lived in that district, and you had to go to school in your district. Then we moved down to 401 Shawmut Avenue and I went to the George Bancroft and Rice Schools. The teacher there, Miss Brady, said "This boy knows how to draw" and she called my mother and suggested I go to the children's Art Center. So there are two instances -- if I'd stayed at the Lafayette School, I probably never would have known anything about drawing and I probably would have had some problems, as being in that teacher's eyes sort of mentally retarded -- not hopelessly so, but . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Inside, were you not very interested in most subjects in school?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I had, I guess, normal interest. But anyhow, what impressed this particular teacher was my lack of talking . I guess I've sort of remedied that particular deficiency, since then.

ROBERT BROWN: Maybe you were just shy.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I don't know what it was. Even at home during those early years some of the other people -- not my parents -- would get after me and say, "Boy, why don't you talk?" And I'd say, "I don't want to." [Both laugh} Of course I can't remember that, but that's what they've told me.

ROBERT BROWN: You spent a lot of time to yourself in those years . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, I guess so, because you see I was the only child that lived. If all of us had been alive, there would have been four of us. But I was an only child and I presume that would have some effect.

ROBERT BROWN: Was your mother around, though, quite a lot?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. I was very close to her, I suppose. I was born on March 20, 1910, and I was a premature baby. As a matter of fact, all of us were premature. With today's science, probably my sister would be alive today. I think she struggled along for a few months before she succumbed. According to "rules and regulations," I shouldn't be alive either but nobody told me that and I didn't know that at the time. [Both laugh heartily] I weighed less than three pounds when I was born. I was about a month early. Then for a long while it was touch and go as to whether I'd make it or not. My mother tells me that what she had to do each night was fasten me onto a kind of ironing board thing, fasten my legs down on this particular board, to keep my bones straight. If she hadn't done that, I probably would have been a cripple. It wasn't until I was around five that they were sure I was going to make it.

ROBERT BROWN: Even a little later than these times you're talking about, were you a little frailer than your contemporaries?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I guess so (hesitatingly). I suppose. But in a picture of me when I was six, I look healthy enough there. (RB agrees) But that doesn't give any idea of the struggle I had to bring me up to that particular stage. And I've enjoyed reasonably good health up to now.

ROBERT BROWN: We're looking, here, at something that's delightful -- it's the struggle of two dinosaurs, much bigger than little tiny humans down on the ground who are shooting at them. [He laughs] This is no doubt from imagination. What source is there for this? Could you go into this a bit? You've done a number of things like this.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, there was a movie that came out called "The Lost World" and I think one of the chief characters in it was a chap called Wallace Beery, of the famous Beery brothers -- there was Noah, and Wallace. It was a sort of science-fiction thing. The story was about this plateau in Patagonia, down in South America, upon which the dinosaurs still exist. A group of England went down to visit and had all kinds of adventures on this plateau dodging pterodactyls, brontosauri and tyrannosauri and all the other various denizens of what you might call the Jurassic Period. There was a caveman mixed in there, too -- how he got mixed into this particular deal I don't know, but he was there, too. [Both laugh] So that made quite an impression and I made a few drawings of these creatures. This particular sketch of these oversized pterodactyls, a pen drawing . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: An example of that.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you frightened by it?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh no . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Did you wish you lived in a place like that?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, I found it fascinating, an adventure -- sort of like this space stuff we have today.

ROBERT BROWN: How old were you, when you did this?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh, say around 12, 13 or 14.

ROBERT BROWN: The line seems much surer than in the earlier drawings. There's a feeling of one animal biting another, and the little human figures moving around in different postures. You seem much more sure of your composition and drawing. This is after you'd had a couple of years at the Children's Art Center?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Here's another streetscape. South End, no doubt.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: But it's in perspective. And again I'd say the drawing . . . what was it? Charcoal?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, it's pencil, rather soft pencil.

ROBERT BROWN: The drawing seems a little surer. It's more of an impressionistic effect, as compared with those very early ones we looked at.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, the period is almost the same. I'd say I was around 12 or 13. And this is a view of Warren Avenue. It shows the Old English High School. It's a drawing that I could probably use as a basis for a reconstruction. It shows how they tore down trees in those days. The tree was sawed through, then a chain was attached to it, and then a team of horses would apply pressure to bring down the tree. That's what this shows, here.

ROBERT BROWN: This was something you saw?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You sketched while they were doing it?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I probably did. I may have drawn it right on the spot. If not, then shortly thereafter, while the memory was still fresh. I sort of search for these drawings, now, because they do show bits and pieces of the life of that particular period. I'm sufficiently removed from it now so that it is a sort of historic moment. There's a car that looks like a model T Ford in the background.

ROBERT BROWN: This next one coming up is a pen-and-watercolor drawing of a circus -- the elephants, one wagon and the tents. This, no doubt, as for many children, was a very vivid thing.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. In those days they used to have real circus parades. Then, the tents and things were thrown off at a place where Northeastern University is today. Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey, and also Sells-Floto would come. That's one of the few times when Dad and I would go around together. I remember he and I used to go to the lot there and watch them put up the tents and all that sort of activity. It was interesting to see the animals and get the smell of sawdust and the whole bit.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you do quite a few sketches of the circus?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Apparently I did. I only have one or two here.

ROBERT BROWN: You say this was one of the few times when you went around with your father. In general . . . well, he was busy working, for one thing.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I didn't have too much association with him, in one sense. Of course he was home every day, naturally. But, as a companion, like man-to-man kind of business, he was somewhat distant. He was considerably older than my mother. Age-wise, there were almost three generations. Dad was 35 when he married my mother, and she was 18.

ROBERT BROWN: So by this time, what is he? About 50 or so? Or approaching that age?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Somewhat dubiously] Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: In contrast, to your mother you were quite close, you said. Maybe one last thing we could look at here, you've got here a watercolor by your mother herself.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Did she paint and draw quite a lot, as well, during your childhood?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE She did a little drawing. As I look at her work today, she did have the ability on her own to be an artist in her own right. Of course, she was never trained. She used to write poetry. Nothing that was published -- maybe one or two things that would get into a newspaper, something like that. She could write. And she had the basic ability to draw.

ROBERT BROWN: I think her color here is quite fine, too. A ship at sea, with an Indian on the beach. The waves, and the cloud effects in the sky are . . . .

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE It's called "Lonesome Pine." There's a lone pine tree up there, growing in the rocks.

ROBERT BROWN: Did this have an effect on you? Your seeing her write poems? You liked to write, a lot. And your seeing her do some painting once in a while?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE As a matter of fact, her writing was probably the beginning of my drawing. When she started to write, I'd see her pick up a pen, and of course I'd want to write, too. So she started me off on drawing just to keep me quiet, I guess. That's how it came about.

ROBERT BROWN: Really? [Laughing] At least, you could, even as a small child, do that with your pen, couldn't you?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. [RB laughs heartily]

[END OF THIS INTERVIEW]

TAPE-RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH A. R. CRITE
JUNE 29, 1979
INTERVIEWER: ROBERT BROWN

ROBERT BROWN: Today we're going to begin inching our way through your work, discussing what phases of your career it represents. I thought we'd begin in the very beginning. After your youthful work, you were at the Massachusetts College of Art for at least a brief time, in 1930. Could you discuss that a bit?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I was at the Mass. College of Art, I think, for one semester, and I think I went at night. If I remember correctly (that was a long time ago), I took a course in -- maybe it was sculpture. I vaguely remember an instructor by the name of Mr. Potter, I think his name was. I don't remember much else of that particular period. I think I also went to Boston University business school and took one or two courses there. It's something like the extension courses that they had. That was about practically all, as far as Mass. College of Art is concerned. That was about it.

ROBERT BROWN: You have no vivid memory of that. Apparently -- you'd had courses earlier, and there you had a few more. Probably in night school.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Assents]

ROBERT BROWN: But this prepared you then, or at least after that you immediately went to the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Is that correct?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I was there at the same time.

ROBERT BROWN: At the same time?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, you see I went to the Museum School from 1929 through '36. During that period of time, I went to the Mass. College of Art at night for just about one semester. In other words, I was going to two schools in time.

ROBERT BROWN: How did you come to enter the Museum School, in 1929? How did that come about?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I studied at the Museum of Fine Arts in the vocational art classes, a program which they had in connection with the Boston school system.

ROBERT BROWN: This was Saturday classes?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, this was all during the week. So, as soon as I got through high school, I went up to the Museum and took courses in charcoal drawing, design, textile design, composition, and so forth. In my senior year -- the Museum school issued one or two scholarships to the students of that particular program -- I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to the Museum School.

ROBERT BROWN: This was called a vocational program?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE In those days, they called it High School Vocational Art Classes.

ROBERT BROWN: Were many of the children in those classes then going into industry or work for retailers or something, as illustrators, or . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I don't know. It was just a series of classes offered by the Museum of fine Arts. So I suspect that some of the students may have gone into professional schools from there.

ROBERT BROWN: And others might have gone directly to work, I guess.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE That's a possibility.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you develop some chums or friends while you were at these art classes?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Not really. I'd probably only see them once a day. I didn't develop any more friends there than I did in other high school classes.

ROBERT BROWN: With a scholarship, then, you entered the Museum School in the fall of 1929?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. And it was rather fortunate that I got the scholarship, because you see at the time I'd made application to the Yale University art school. And though my grades weren't the best in the world, for some reason or other they decided to accept me. So I had a letter of acceptance from Yale. Then the Museum School scholarship came through, so I decided to stay here in Boston. Some people were rather unhappy about that. They thought I should have the experience of going away to school. But, as it turned out, it was a rather fortunate thing that I did stay because my father was seriously injured in October. He was a very powerful man. He was an engineer and, of course, he had an engineer's license. Apparently he was working with some kind of electrical drill and the thing short-circuited. Anyhow, it caused him a massive cerebral hemorrhage. It should have killed him immediately but it didn't. So that meant that Mother and I had about 200 pounds of man to deal with for the next seven years. Also, in 1929 was "the great Crash." That meant that a lot of people were out of work.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you have to exist on your father's pension?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE In those days they didn't have pensions. The company paid some monies to us for a while. But not much. He didn't have such a thing as workmen's compensation. That didn't come until later on; I guess with FDR.

ROBERT BROWN: You were living here in the South End of Boston?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, we were living at No. 2 Dillwood [?] Street. That's right on the edge of the South End.

ROBERT BROWN: So you were within easy walking distance of the Museum School, then.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, that was no problem. My mother was able to secure work, I guess you'd call it, as a domestic -- cleaning up apartments, things like that, for well-to-do people in the downtown area. I might say, just as a matter of tribute, in a way, that she worked for quite a few young men. My mother was a very good looking woman -- I'm not saying that because she was my mother, that's a matter of fact. And these young men appreciated her, and they appreciated what she was trying to do -- help me go through school, and so forth. They also appreciated her character. So they made sure she was never molested. And they would recommend other people, when she got through working for one person or another. And they would be scrupulous about that. Because it would have been very easy for a person like my mother to have all kinds of unexpected difficulties. I must say that, as a tribute to these young men, that they were so careful of her and practically acted as guardians for her, you might say.

ROBERT BROWN: Here at the very time you're going to art school, there are lots of concerns and worries. Is that the way you felt at that time, as a young student?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, I didn't. Because I wasn't conscious of that sort of thing.

ROBERT BROWN: At that time you were mainly intent on going to the school? Were you very excited about doing so?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [With some hesitation] Yes, but it was tempered by the domestic situation. Having a father who was practically helpless, that had a very sobering effect.

ROBERT BROWN: What did you do at the beginning when you went to art school? Could you describe to us what was the curriculum? Who were some of the teachers?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Philip Hale was head of the painting department. When I first went to the school, we did cast drawings, then we went into life drawing.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you work with him? Did he teach you directly?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Again hesitatingly] Yes, I just remember that vaguely. I went in for design. There was a Mr. Clark who was head of the design department, so I took courses with him. Then there was a Miss Alice Brooks, she was also a high school vocational art class but she also taught design. There were two or three other teachers; I can't remember their names.

ROBERT BROWN: Did they work closely with you? Or were they dignified remote figures?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, they worked very closely with me. They were very much interested in my work.

ROBERT BROWN: Why do you suppose they were?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I don't know. I suppose I could be egotistical and say that they saw a spark of genius in me. [Both laugh heartily]

ROBERT BROWN: But they probably did think you were rather precocious? At least very able?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE They probably did. But, as far as talent is concerned, I was just among a group of very talented people. Because almost everybody in the Art school was of a high caliber. In the school, we went through an extraordinary experience, as far as that school is concerned, which was extremely unusual. It has to be people in that particular time frame who have experienced it. That is this: during my tour of duty there, I went to practically three different schools during that time. By that I mean this: When Philip Hale had joined his ancestors, then the whole painting system was changed, you might say -- revised and so forth. We received a couple of teachers from England, from the Slade School in London -- a Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Burns. So the painting department was under their tutelage or headship for a period. That meant the whole philosophy and everything else went through almost a revolution.

ROBERT BROWN: What was it? What did it consist of, this change?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, you see, Philip Hale was of the old school, academic school. And of course they had Mr. Tarboom [phon. sp.], Mr. Vincent [?], and Patrick Gavin [?]. The name Patrick Gavin is of particular interest. I don't remember any contacts with Patrick Gavin but he was there for a short while, apparently. Then he became an instructor at the Mass. College of Art. But the reason I bring up his name is because he's the father of The Reverend Kearney [?] Gavin, who happens to be the curator of the Semitic Museum at Harvard, with whom I'm working today.

ROBERT BROWN: So it's a real connection.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, it is.

ROBERT BROWN: Philip Hale's program, then, was traditional academic, drawing from a cast, and the like.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE And the life paintings.

ROBERT BROWN: But the two Englishmen, Burns and Guthrie -- what program did they follow?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE They had rather precise drawings. There was a great deal of stress on draftsmanship. I guess the best way I could describe them is that their approach was a little bit like the Flemish masters -- like the van Eyck brothers, for example, or Rogier van der Weyden, or people like that. A great deal of stress on detail. The color work was rather sober, rather subdued in a sense.

ROBERT BROWN: What medium did you work in? Several?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I did work in oils and watercolor and drawings and so forth. They stayed on for I guess about four years.

ROBERT BROWN: By the way, your seven years there, was that typical? It was a long curriculum?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Well, I took two complete courses. I took a complete course in design, and also a complete course in drawing and painting.

ROBERT BROWN: Could you explain the design? What did that mean?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, textiles, and interiors . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Whom did you work with?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I worked with [tries to recall names] -- Alice Brooks - -

ROBERT BROWN: She was the general design instructor?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE She was one of the instructors. And the man whose name I'm trying to remember . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: What sort of work did he have you do?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Designing textiles, and interiors -- for example, design a room, what the furnishings would be. Then go to the Museum and study the period rooms they had over there. They had just opened up some brand-new rooms there, like the Tudor Room, and 18th Century, and so on -- a brand-new wing opened up back there.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you asked to do variations on period rooms, in your interior design?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, that was one thing. Then I was asked to make up a design for a four-room or a 12-room home, for example. And that a person would like to have this or that or the other, so I'd design something like that.

ROBERT BROWN: Based on what, historical furniture?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: It wasn't contemporary design in this course?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh, yes, we had that, too.

ROBERT BROWN: What sort of things did they stress there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, it was "contemporary" for back in the 1930's. Whatever was the popular mode then would reflect itself so far as the school was concerned. I'd have to refer back to Saturday Evening Posts and Cosmopolitan and McCall's magazines for the kinds of things back in that particular period of the 30's. I don't think I did any fashion designs; I don't recall any. Then, of course, there was the idea of composition. There was some blockprinting . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Was composition taught in a theoretical, general way?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. You'd study the Old Masters like Veronese, the Venetian man of the Renaissance, and the theories of that kind of design -- pyramids, diagonals, and the controposto, I guess, of people like Rubens. You'd take off on Titian, go back to Raphael . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Did you enjoy these studies of art of the past?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. We had some art history too, so at least I know the difference between Doric and Corinthian, and also something about Gothic and Baroque, that sort of business.

ROBERT BROWN: You said earlier there was a third change while you were still in school. Burns and Guthrie were there, then they left.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Then we had a teacher named Alexander Yakovlev [phon. sp.] and I would practically call him an artist-anthropologist. He was Russian. The best way to describe his work would be -- he had a precise drawing, something like Botticelli. So, if you could translate that into 1930 terms, it might give an idea. He made a tremendous impact on all of his students.

ROBERT BROWN: Why do you suppose he did?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE He was a vibrant personality, for one thing. He had what you'd call charisma, I guess. Being an artist-anthropologist, of course he was quite adventurous, a venturesome person. He was the Citroen Motorcade -- the auto company had a motorcade across the Sahara, so he'd bring back all these drawings of North Africans. Like the Tuaregs, for example, and other peoples in North Africa. Then he'd go on another expedition out into the Gobi Desert and come back with pictures of the Mongols and the Yoruks. And he went to Japan. He had huge portfolios of these drawings, sort of conte crayon drawings, red heightened with black for accents. So he invited us over to his studio, some of his students. You'd see a great display of these various things. I kind of wished he'd gone down into the Andes Mountains and got pictures of the Peruvians and all that kind of business down there.

ROBERT BROWN: You feel that he left out one continent! [Both laugh] What was your attitude? Were you just sort of in awe of how facile he was?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, all of us were. He made a tremendous impact on all of us. A lot of his students became almost, you might say, little Yakovlevs in a sense. I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit that a great deal of his influence came through on me too. Yes, he was a great virtuoso in a sense; that is, he could make a life-sized life drawing almost within an hour in demonstrating to us what he wanted us to look for and so forth. He had these huge sheets of paper and the model would stand over on one side and he'd go ahead and make up this drawing showing us what he wanted. Of course, we all stood around almost open-mouthed at this miracle of work.

ROBERT BROWN: He'd lecture while he worked? He'd be talking to you?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. He had an accent that was a sort of combined Russian and French.

ROBERT BROWN: What was he trying to emphasize, do you remember, when he was drawing and talking? What was he trying to get across to you students?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE He emphasized the accuracy of drawing and understanding emotion -- making your things vital and living. Hard to describe . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Would you say that in your own case this was a new ingredient -- that you weren't able to be so accurate or get this vibrancy into your drawing until he came along?

ROBERT BROWN: Well, I had it already, I guess. He just more or less accentuated it, in a way. I would say that the most important thing to look back at now is probably the sense of inspiration he gave to all of us.

ROBERT BROWN: What did he inspire you about?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, you felt alive when you were working on your drawings. Just a sense of vitality that you'd have.

ROBERT BROWN: All of this work you were doing, on the other hand there was a counter-force to that, and that was the situation at home, right? Your father's invalidism . . . . Did you often get depressed at that time or was work at school so intense that it carried you through this very bad period?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes [With hesitation]. I don't know. You see, after the first shock of my father's illness -- it was really quite a shock because we saw this great big healthy man going to work in the morning, and then we got a call from the hospital and seeing him laying up in bed, with distraught face and practically helpless -- the initial shock was quite something. Then there was a period of readjustment. After that, that became the normal way of life, so we more or less adapted to it.

ROBERT BROWN: Maybe we could look at two or three of these drawings from your time at the Museum school. The top two are figure studies from 1934. Who would have been your teacher at that point?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Alexander Yakovlev.

ROBERT BROWN: Here you are working in conte crayon -- it looks like a sepia crayon?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: In the male and female study. As we look at these, could you explain what you were trying to get across in this -- what lesson you were trying to satisfy? [ARC laughs] I assume as a student you were.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, one thing I wanted to get was solidity, to get the impression that I was working with a solid mass there. Then, of course, there's the bone structure, then the muscles on top of that, then the skin on top of that. In other words, you were working with a solid human being, so I tried to get that. There was great stress on the structure of it.

ROBERT BROWN: On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be too much stress here on the feel of the surface, the texture. Is that accurate?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I guess so. I hadn't thought of it, as a matter of fact.

ROBERT BROWN: The appearance of the skin. It does seem that the concentration is on volume.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Were there other teachers? You mentioned Guthrie and Burns -- would they have been more interested in appearance and, say, the very texture of various materials, flesh and the like?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Reflecting] Well . . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: You said they were something like the Flemish painters.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. The thing was, in a sense, preciseness. That is, for example, if I made a drawing of a brick building, then they'd say put in all the bricks; that type of thing. In drawing they were very precise; they had that thing. One thing I must say about the school as a whole: All during these three different periods there was a great deal of stress on drawing. That was considered of prime importance. I don't know what they do in school today but back in those days, they stressed you must learn how to draw.

ROBERT BROWN: You feel that's been a good thing.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, I'm a firm believer in that. I'm a firm believer today that a person should be able to draw in the classical fashion and know how to do it. I feel that's important as a form of discipline. But I don't believe you should make exact drawing an end in itself, but rather it should be a means toward an end. Because, if the person masters the art of drawing, then of course that individual has the skill at his fingertips. Then he's perfectly free to do whatever he wants -- to make an abstract, or wants to do this, that or other, he'll be able to do so with a great deal of facility. If he has an inability to draw to begin with, then of course he'll always be faced with this particular problem -- that he wants to do something, he can't do it, because he doesn't have the ability to do it or the skills to do it. So I believe that learning how to draw is just the same as learning how to handle tools -- like a carpenter or any of the other disciplines.

ROBERT BROWN: Expression can come later, is that right?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. I mean, it's like rules of grammar. It just makes it a little easier for you to make whatever statement you wish to make. But if you don't understand the rules of grammar to begin with, then of course you'll always have trouble.

ROBERT BROWN: You've mentioned already that you had painting in color. Was color not as stressed in painting, wasn't as stressed as drawing? Is that your recollection as you look back?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No. All was stressed. When you went into painting class -- of course we did oil painting -- the color was stressed.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you have to study color?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, they had color charts, all that. I got that in the design department.

ROBERT BROWN: This drawing here, a charcoal of about the same time, at least the time when you were in school, you said to me earlier is directly drawn; or at least it's drawn from memory of an incident. Could you describe this a bit for us?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, you see, while I was in the art school, that was you might say only one portion of my whole drawing experience. During the period of art school I was making these neighborhood paintings, I was also making these illustrations for spirituals, and I was doing these pencil drawings which apparently became well known. At least, I find right now that that seems to be one of the favorite aspects of my work which is being purchased. But anyhow I used to go down to the wharf, because the waterfront was quite a fascinating place. So I was very much interested in ships. This particular charcoal drawing I have here shows one of the Eastern Steamship Line -- it may have been either the Yarmouth or the St. Johns. Back in those days, in the 20's, there was this teamship company of coastal steamers which served New York, on one hand, and went up to Portland and Portsmouth and Yarmouth on the other. This particular steamship line was the one that had that famous ship that went out one night to Portland, was lost, and never was found. I think that particular ship was a side-wheeler. But at any rate . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: There's no details to speak of, in this drawing. You weren't drawn to the details of these ships, you're hardly a ship's portraitist. You were more interested, it looks like, in large volumes and very simplified -- what was your intention, would you say, here?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE That's just more or less a study in composition. Showing loading one of these ships. I was just trying a pattern of light and shade.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 2]

[BEGINNING OF TAPE 2, SIDE 1]

[TAPE PICKS UP IN MID-SENTENCE]

ROBERT BROWN: . . . painting. Perhaps you did. If you had, what would you have stressed then?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I would be stressing an incident. Showing the movements of people going on board ship, loading it and so on, the kind of activity you get on a waterfront scene like that.

ROBERT BROWN: It's not unlike, then, what you've called your neighborhood paintings . . .

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: . . . or you once called your genre paintings of this time.

TAPE-RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH A. R. CRITE
JUNE 29, 1979
INTERVIEWER: ROBERT BROWN

ROBERT BROWN: This is an interview with Alan Crite on June 29, 1979.

ROBERT BROWN: We're looking now at a pencil drawing of a woman flanked by two small children. They're all very nicely dressed, walking down the street. You call it "Sunday Afternoon." It has the subtitle, "Sunday Swank" and dated August 1934. So you're in the Museum school at this time, but presumably this was more or less done on your own. Could you tell me why you did this? What did you have in mind when you did this? Is this sheer observation, one of the neighborhood paintings or drawings?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. Well, you see, during the particular period I did a lot of pencil drawings, made a lot of studies of the neighborhood and the people in the neighborhood. I had several reasons for doing it during this particular period. I was making studies of black people just as ordinary human beings, because the usual picture that one had -- at least that's my impression -- was that the artist was strongly influenced by, you might say, the jazz person up in Harlem, or of the sharecropper in the deep South. There was nothing in between -- of just the ordinary middle-class person who goes to church, does the work, etc. What I decided to do back in those days -- and as a matter of fact I'm still doing it -- was just simply to record the life of black people as I saw them in the city where I lived, which happened to be Boston. That's what this drawing is an expression of. This would probably be a Sunday morning, and of course back in those days the life of the church was extremely important in the lives of the people because the church served as a place of worship, also as a community center, and quite a few other functions. It was more or less the heart of the life of the great majority of black people in those days. So, you'd come out in your Sunday best, and that's what I was trying to show here. This young woman, who is obviously attractive, or at least I thought so, flanked by a couple of children. And in the background a couple of well-dressed young men giving this gal the once-over and approval. It's a typical kind of Sunday scene that one would see on Columbus Avenue, on Tremont Street or any other street here in Boston.

ROBERT BROWN: You mentioned one time that you felt you were more of an observer than a participant in much of this.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. I sort of regarded myself as a recorder, or you might say a storyteller. As a matter of fact, I suppose that would be one main characteristic of my work -- that I am a storyteller. Something like what they call the zheero [pure phon. sp.], so far as the African tradition is concerned. And I didn't realize how much of a storyteller I really was, because I made recordings of the life of the 1930's, and also showing the background of the various streets of the city. Today, of course, a lot of these streets have vanished, the people have disappeared, and the only record of them in many instances are the drawings which I made. So, the simple idea that I had in the back of my head as I made these drawings is just simply to show black people as ordinary people, human beings that had their loves and their distresses, their joys and happiness and sorrows -- just plain, ordinary people. So I made all these different street scenes with the horse carts, the vegetable man, the fish man; or people gossiping, children playing in the streets or the playground -- all of these short of homely things.

ROBERT BROWN: Was there quite a distinct and stable black community where you lived?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, there was. Relatively stable. As a matter of fact, the neighborhoods in general, whether they were black or otherwise, were relatively stable back there in the 30's. In the South End there was a kind of transient population, where you'd get population changes. But they were more or less gradual. The massive disruption didn't come until later when there was this great urban renewal project which, in my opinion, was a disaster, when neighborhood after neighborhood was wiped out. One classic example is what took place in the West End. Unfortunately, West End isn't an isolated phenomenon, but rather more or less the usual method of procedures. The bulldozers would come in and knock down and destroy houses, knock down and destroy neighborhoods, and people would become you might say "development refugees." So we've had a tremendous refugee problem in this country. The life that existed just simply vanished. That's one of the things which has happened.

ROBERT BROWN: These neighborhood recordings, as you call them, of the 30's were shown and displayed occasionally, weren't they? Some of the paintings you made were collected by museums and the like, weren't they, at that time? Or fairly shortly thereafter?? I'm thinking of -- there's at least one in the Phillips Collection in Washington, and I think -- well, there are now several of the Boston Athenaeum, but certain museums and people were collecting them, weren't they?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. People were. Of course, at the time when I made the paintings, very few of them were sold, as far as the oil paintings are concerned.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you have a dealer?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. The Grace Horne Galleries, on Newbury Street, took an interest. And as I look back on it now, it was an act of courage on their part. They had a great deal of faith in me, in a way. And I'm relatively sure that I probably may have been the only black artist who was consistently shown on Newbury Street back in the 30's. So they were very much interested in the work, obviously, and they did display it. A few of my things were sold. Of course, we have to remember that this is during the Depression, so that unless you were very well off, you simply did not buy works of art. But I had a formal introduction into the art world. I belonged to a society called the Boston Society of Independent Artists. And in one of the exhibitions I had an oil painting called "Settling the World's Problems" -- I wish I had that painting today -- and that represented my more or less formal introduction into the art world. I was introduced, you might say, into the art world by the dean of art critics of that time. Mr. William Cochran/Cochrane of the Boston Evening Transcript. There was a great reproduction of my painting in the paper, and so forth.

ROBERT BROWN: Was this practically the first time you got acquainted with some of the older artists of the area?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [With hesitancy] Yes-s-s, and no. In the Society of Independent Artists I did have a chance to meet a few of the artists. In that society you had well-known professionals as well as sub-professionals, because the exhibition was a non-juried show. And the idea was to give younger people like myself, unknown, a chance to be introduced into the art world and receive recognition.

ROBERT BROWN: Mr. Cochran/Cochrane was important in this, but who were some of the other people you got to know?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE As far as the critics were concerned, there was a Mr. Philpott [sp?] of the Boston Globe . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: What about artists?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE People like Harvey Pepper, and Charles Hopkins, and William B. Hazleton.

ROBERT BROWN: These were people you got to know to some extent?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: By the way -- I haven't asked you -- did you, with either of these artists or with your fellow students, did you discuss art very much?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. These artists that I mentioned -- Pepper and Hopkins and Hazleton -- were much older than I.

ROBERT BROWN: But still, would they . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, they would discuss my work. Sometimes they'd buy it. Hazleton did give me some instruction. I went up to, I think it was Rockport, and he had me doing some watercolors up there; watercolor studies. I ran across somebody, I can't remember his name, he recalled that particular period to mind.

ROBERT BROWN: In what way?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE He reminded me of the time I did work with Mr. Hazleton. I was introduced into the Independent Artists society by Mr. Walter Killum [?]. He was of the Killum, & Creedy [?], architects, in Boston. It was rather an extraordinary period, because I was introduced to some other architects. I became acquainted with Ralph Adams Cram -- not to know him very well, but I did become acquainted with a Mr. Charles McGinnis, who did some work at Trinity Church. He was more or less responsible for a later development -- introducing me to Harold Rambush [phon. sp.] of the Rambush Decorating company . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: . . . of the 1940's when you worked for them. What was McGinnis like?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE He looked like a patriarch. He was a great big towering man with white hair and a huge mustache, as I recall. His voice boomed like an organ [Laughing]. I probably didn't see or hear him, it was just that image that I had of him. A very, very dynamic person.

ROBERT BROWN: But you were fairly regularly illustrated and written up in the Boston press, at least, as we can see. And you've described it. About that time, 1934 or '36 -- we've just been talking about the genre and neighborhood paintings -- came the Works Progress Administration, the WPA. And you were on the Project for a bit. How long?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I was in two projects, you might say. There was one that came, I think, about 1934.

ROBERT BROWN: Is that the Public Works of Art Project? The Treasury Department, right?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. The office for that was at the Isabella Stewart/Jack Gardner palace. I was on that for a few months.

ROBERT BROWN: This helped to subsidize your going to school?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. And then I was on the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, for about a year or so. They had two categories -- non-relief artists, and relief artists. I was on as a non-relief artist. Then, when the money ran out on that particular section, they wanted me to continue, but I'd have to continue as a relief artist.

ROBERT BROWN: What was the difference?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE That meant that you were on relief. My mother and I, we didn't quite like that connotation. So we took the painful decision to not continue in the program.

ROBERT BROWN: You would have been on what we call "welfare," today.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. We had a kind of less-than-enthusiastic view of that. But the genre paintings I did for the WPA were just an extension of the work I was already doing

ROBERT BROWN: That's why I ask about it, right now. There are a number of street scenes. Here's one of horses . . . .

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE That's the Shawmut Avenue Stables. One of the things that surprised me about all of these paintings which I did back in that particular period is the prevalence of horses and wagons. I hadn't thought of that, but of course you very seldom see that nowadays.

ROBERT BROWN: They were very common still, then, even in urban life.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: I notice, as I look at it, this particular scene, it's quite simplified. You're not exactly under the spell of Guthrie an Burns at this time. This is 1936. There's a great deal of spirited action -- sort of frozen action tough, but spirited postures on the people's part. The man pushing the handcart, the man leading the horse into the stables. Were these, then, acquired by the government?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, they were. The paintings I did on WPA were government property. I lost track of practically all of the paintings except for one painting which is now in the national collection of the Smithsonian -- that's called "School's Out." That made quite an impression. As a matter of fact, that was in an exhibition in the Museum of Modern At in New York of WPA paintings, and this one was featured in reviews when they came out. I think it was in the New York Times, something like that. I had the pleasure of seeing that painting recently at an exhibition of Decorova [phon. sp.] Museum, so I had a chance to reacquaint myself with it. It was a rather strange experience to see this painting . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Because you hadn't seen it for so long?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. And then of course it recalled so many [Loud crash in room, obscures a few words.] Because the whole scene has vanished today -- the school and everything have just disappeared. There's a housing project now on the location where the school was, as shown in the painting.

ROBERT BROWN: Who was the supervisor? And what relation would you have had with him or her on the WPA Project?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE The only supervisor I remember offhand -- I think his name was Frank Sterner -- I think that's what it was. He knew me from an earlier period which I can't remember offhand. But he was instrumental later on in establishing a painters' workshop which had some relationship to the Fogg Art Museum. We studied techniques of painting, mixed media, and so on. And we were just going into mosaics, but by that time World War II had made things rather difficult. So that particular project died. We had classes over at the Kensington Building that used to be on the corner of Exeter and Boylson Streets. That building was identified by a couple of stone lions that stood up there in solemn dignity. These lions had been removed to the Copley Plaza and unfortunately some of this dignity had been covered with gold paint! I can't imagine anything more . . . . [Words seem to fail him here.] [Both laugh]

ROBERT BROWN: Was that a useful thing -- the painters' workshop, for you?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes. I had a chance to do frescoes -- the only frescoes I'd ever done in my life. Both of them are in this house right at the moment. And I learned something about wax painting and a few other things like that.

ROBERT BROWN: But at the time you were on the WPA, you didn't have that much contact with a supervisor, and you were in fact allowed to paint pretty much what you wanted to paint. Is that right?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes. my commission was just to do easel paintings.

ROBERT BROWN: And no questions about subjects or anything.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh no. They just about left that completely up to me. My feeling is that, as far as the WPA is concerned, it left the artist with a great deal of freedom. The program was quite successful. The present NEH program which we have today is of an entirely different character, and to some extent rather less supportive of the artist when you compare it with the Works Progress Administration. I think the WPA probably followed a little more the European model as a supporter of the arts, shall I say. It covered a great deal more than just painting -- the visual arts were also covered. The , and the theater arts, and so forth. So it's probably responsible at least in part for what you might call the Harlem Renaissance -- people like Countee Cullen and Baldwin.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you aware of that Harlem Renaissance in the 30's?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Vaguely. We heard a whole lot about Harlem, but of course the picture I got of Harlem -- I have some relatives down there so I used to visit there now and then. But of course I would see it from the point of view of visiting a place where my relatives lived. I had an uncle who was a policeman. In the art field, I wasn't that conscious of . . . I was conscious of Harlem more as being a jazz center, and conscious of what you might call the jazz Negro. That would be the time of Duke Ellington and I guess Gillespie and all the other jazz greats.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you interested in jazz yourself?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, not really. My mother had a very dim view of jazz.

ROBERT BROWN: Why, do you suppose?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Well, there are two approaches you might say, as far as Black people are concerned, I guess. Some people regarded jazz -- some of the good church people, regarded jazz as almost a drumbeat to the Devil. My mother's father was a Baptist. Some of the churches looked with less than favor upon such things as dancing, and jazz, and that sort of business. So I must say that my grandfather didn't object to my mother doing dancing or anything like that, but he seemed to have, or at least my mother had, rather a prejudice against jazz. As a result, my enthusiasm has been extremely tempered. A little bit of it goes a long way with me. I've probably been rather preconditioned in that sense.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, to get to another expression of yours in the 30's namely, portraits, I get the feeling as I look at your portraits that there is a severity, almost a quiet dignity, about the people you portray. Perhaps we could talk a bit about the portraits. What we're looking at here are oil paintings. Again, something you're doing while you're at art school but, I gather, like the neighborhood paintings, done on your own.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Do we want to start by looking at what you've told me is the earliest?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I did quite a few portrait studies. I did some of my mother. They're mostly of my friends.

ROBERT BROWN: What about the one over there?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE That's a portrait of Lois.

ROBERT BROWN: Lois. That's what -- the early 30's?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Could you comment on that? What were you attempting to do?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Lois was a friend of mine. If I'd followed through with my instincts, she would have been my wife. She was the child of a friend of mine. When I say childhood background -- she was about six, I was probably about eight or nine. We sort of grew up together. She went to Simmons College. She used to come to the house quite a lot, so I used to make drawings of her. I decided to make this portrait study of her. At that time, I was thinking of James Abbott McNeill Whistler -- that more or less governed control of my coloring and composition. The painting has been on exhibition at the Museum for the Jubilee show of Black Art that's been there, and it's been shown, I think, at the National Center for Afro-American Artists.

ROBERT BROWN: to what extent is this indebted to what you were learning at art school? It's a rather limited palette. You said it's been influenced somewhat by Whistler, and certainly the composition is more like that of Whistler's "Mother," vaguely speaking.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you think in this you see any other intention besides . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Yes, well maybe something of Guthrie and Burns -- the sort of sober coloring might have had some influence. In all of the portraits, the parties are very still -- that is, none of them are animated to any extent. That probably may be characteristic of my portrait studies, at least of that particular period. I haven't done any oils since.

ROBERT BROWN: Are there any others you'd like me to bring up for . . . ?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Turning aside off-mike] Yes, well, there's this man with a mustache. His name was Jack Bates. He was a playwright, so I have in the background a scene from one of his plays. He used to write these dramas of rural life in the South. Some of these were broadcast over the radio. I sang in a group called the Clef [?] Choir -- we sang spirituals. And he used this as musical background for these particular plays which were broadcast over Station WNAC, here in Boston. Jack Bates died about two or three years ago. I think he was a little bit older than I. He was in World War I; he had been gassed in that War. But he was on the border of genius, you might say, as far as his plays are concerned. Some of them were produced in some of the little theater groups that existed back in those days in the 30's -- the Peabody Playhouse, the Fine Arts Theater which used to be on Norway Street. Today, of course, they've got that concrete pile called Church Park.

ROBERT BROWN: This portrait shows a very intense, youngish man. He seems to be sort of gazing off into space. Were you close to him, or was he a fairly reserved person?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE No, he was quite lively as a matter of fact. I have to say that in my portraits I wasn't able to get much animation. That isn't because the people weren't animated, because [He laughs] they sure were. But it's just my interpretation of them.

ROBERT BROWN: It could be, perhaps, again, you were a student at this time. And you're getting, as we saw in the life drawings, a great deal of attention is given to volume relationships and giving a feeling of structure, and not a great deal to expression and vivacity.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I'm not a portraitist by nature. It takes quite a bit of discipline to be a portrait painter -- a certain kind of discipline which I didn't have. This thing here, of these two young women -- the darker woman on the left and the lighter one on the right -- of the lighter woman I wanted to make a drawing. But she was a cousin of the darker woman, so in order for me to do it I had to do the cousin. [Laughing] But the cousin took part in some of Jack Bates' plays. She's still around -- in fact both of those girls are still around. One is in her 60's, the other one in her 50's. They came to the house a few weeks ago and were rather fascinated to see this painting of themselves done over 40 years ago. I promised to send them a slide, at least, of this.

ROBERT BROWN: What did they have to say about it?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE [Laughing] Well, they were a little bit surprised, a little amazed, in trying to recognize themselves as they appeared back then.

ROBERT BROWN: Were they flattered by the way they looked then?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I don't know. [Laughing] Because both of them are not slim young things as they were then. One is a grandmother, and the other -- the lighter one -- never married.

ROBERT BROWN: Your first interest in these two was in the lighter one. What do you think you were trying to get across when you did this portrait? Again, it's rather dignified, they're seen in three- quarter view, from the chest up, against a wall with a few details in the immediate background.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Apparently, from the looks of the wall, I must have done that in the girls' house. It isn't any furnishings that I have here.

ROBERT BROWN: When you were in their house doing this, was there a lot of banter, was it fairly lively, or were you proceeding pretty soberly and with some, even timidity?

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE Oh yes, there was a great deal of banter and fun. The portrait sessions were fun because these were friends of mine. Apparently a lot of this doesn't come through in the painting. But the paintings were experiences, all with young people together. Because all these people are my contemporaries, not paintings of my clients.

ROBERT BROWN: Yes.

ALLAN ROHAN CRITE I was just like . . . well, that was the about the spir