?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
ALLAN ROHAN CRITE (1910 - 2007) Boston Street Scene.
Oil on canvas board, 1937. 508x406 mm; 20x16 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right recto. Signed, initialed and inscribed "2 Dilworth St. Boston, Mass." in oil, upper right verso.
Provenance: acquired at auction, Sotheby's Arcade, New York, September 25, 1992; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York; private New York collection.
Exhibited: African-American Art 20th Century Masterworks, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York. November 18, 1993 - February 12, 1994. This was in the first of Michael Rosenfeld's important annual series of African-American exhibitions; Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC, April 2 - August 22, 1999, with the labels on the frame back.
Illustrated: African-American Art 20th Century Masterworks, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, 1994, p. 28.
This charming and quintessential Allan Crite painting of Boston is only the third of his oil paintings to come to auction, and the first to come to auction since 1997. This early canvas depicts a horse-drawn coal cart that was part of the street life in Boston and his "Neighborhood Series" from the 1930s and 40s--his observations of African American life in Boston's Roxbury and South End districts. Crite participated briefly in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1934, and the Federal Art Project, WPA, for a little less than a year in 1936.
Crite best summarizes the series: "My intention in the neighborhood paintings, and some drawings, was to show aspects of life in the city with special reference to the use of the terminology 'black' people and to present them in an ordinary light, persons enjoying the usual pleasure of life with its mixtures of both sorrows and joys ... I was an artist-reporter, recording what I saw." Caro p. 25.
