Zimmerli shows works of Allan Rohan Crite, who created profound art out of everyday Boston scenes

A detail from “Harriet and Leon,” which is is part of the “Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood” exhibition at The Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick.

A mother and her son ride a crowded passenger train. The boy shines beneath a golden skullcap; the woman is ringed with a halo of stars. If their depiction makes them seem supernatural, their comportment suggests that they don’t know it. The other commuters in their vicinity aren’t exactly reveling in their radiance. A stone-faced elderly couple ignores them. A pair of censorious young women sneer and turn away.

Allan Rohan Crite’s “Streetcar Madonna.”

This is “Streetcar Madonna” (1946), a feisty ink and watercolor piece by an artist determined to make an impression. Don’t let his muted colors and his modest subject matter fool you: Allan Rohan Crite liked to stir things up. “Neighborhood,” a retrospective that will hang at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick until July 31, presents Crite as a man brimming with ideas — opinionated, devout, frequently penitent and forever tilting against misapprehensions about his neighbors and his city.

Crite, who died in 2007 at the age of 97, did splashier pictures than “Madonna” — many large linocuts in series, and many in oil paint. But this little picture in gouache and graphite is the most concise summary of the concerns that preoccupied him for decades. It is, for instance, a sly commentary on race relations. The mother and son have dark brown faces while the nonbelievers nearby do not. It is also both religious and rooted, drawing immediate inspiration from the tradition of Blessed Virgin and Child portraits.

Perhaps most importantly, it is Bostonian. These riders are on the Orange T line that connects the African American neighborhoods south of Back Bay to the tall buildings of the Downtown.

In Crite’s work — which includes oil paintings, drawings, watercolor sketches, prints and other forms of expression — we are always in Boston. If he ever left city limits, there aren’t any traces of those trips on his canvases. His art, however, was not provincial. He simply believed that whatever there was to say about the human condition, it was present and observable in Boston. He was probably right.

What is Crite’s version of mid-century Boston like? It is a busy place, full of commerce, sublimated confrontation, people on the move and others just stylishly milling about. It is a churchy place with would-be youth congregations on the corners, prayer sessions at shoeshine stands, and spires rising in the distance over rows of tenements. It is decidedly non-mystical and unglamorous, wearing its trucks and bricks and window-boxes as its humble ornamentation. And as “Streetcar Madonna” and other pieces demonstrate, it is also holy ground. God, Crite believed, was observable in the architecture and on the faces of ordinary Bostonians. The Lord may be taking the train to Faneuil Hall or to a Roxbury cathedral. In piece after piece, Crite asked us to open ourselves to the possibility of that everyday miracle.

An image from Allan Rohan Crite’s “Stations of the Cross” series.

Attunement to the sacred quality of community is a characteristic of African American spirituality, and Crite did some of his best work for town churches. His version of the “Stations of the Cross” consists of 14 emotional linocuts enhanced with watercolor pigment. They are as luminous as stained-glass windows and stark as dramatic as superhero comics.

Crite gives us a weary Jesus with his impossible burden, and tucks him into small, bristling frames with soldiers, servants and heartbroken followers. By the end of the series, he is supine, eyes fixed on a golden heaven as a rail spike is driven through his torn and bleeding feet. We know from his halo that he is in contact with his divinity, but his exhaustion and his crown of thorns link him with beleaguered humanity. This is Christian art at its most elemental — a reconciliation between the celestial and terrestrial essences of Jesus and, by extension, our own.

Mostly, Crite finds his church in the wilds of the city. His paintings of congregations have an earthy quality reflective of the impromptu Christianity practiced by ordinary worshippers.

“Thus Saith the Lord,” one of the most effective of his large oil paintings, shows us a street preacher in front of a mission house, index finger pointing toward God, feet splayed as if he is setting himself against the Devil’s wind, head back and collar fastened. His Bible is open in his hand, but he is not referring to it; he knows this teaching by heart.

Allan Rohan Crite’s “Thus Saith the Lord.”

Do his listeners? Some of them are attentive to the Word. Most are preoccupied with worldly activities such as baseball, tennis, clothing, and staring into space. In the foreground, a boy tips a cart on its side, exposing it as an empty vessel. In the distance, people congregate and ride bicycles, oblivious to the preacher. Even some of those gathered on the corner are zoning out, their faces resolving to the mask-like blankness of a figure in a Balthus painting.

This feels like tough-minded Christian realism — a portrayal of the scattering of the seeds of the Gospel on hard ground. Yet the preacher doesn’t escape criticism from the painter. His experience is an inward one. He’s in the middle of a crowd, but his fervency sets him apart and makes him a man alone.

Crite doesn’t come down hard on any of these people. Instead, they all seem very human: Bostonians living their lives as they grapple (or decline to grapple) with sin and salvation. Thus, each brushstroke feels a bit like a friendly pat on the back.

What matters is that all of these subjects are together on the street, shoulder to shoulder with neighbors in their Sunday best, framed by residential buildings that tower like cathedral walls, and in the shadow of the steeple peeking over a storefront. This is Boston as one big house of worship, and a setting for countless tiny acts of ritual and devotion.

Allan Rohan Crite’s “And the Lord Said.”

In “And the Lord Said,” another instantly endearing and thoroughly transportive oil painting, Bible school breaks out inside a small-time cobbler’s shop. The customers gather around a lay preacher, who is probably the cobbler himself, seated on a box and telling Bible stories. As in “Thus Saith the Lord,” white men listen in, but it is the dark-skinned man with the book, and with the Word.

That is not to imply that Crite believed that African Americans had any particular purchase on Providence. He consistently refused to exoticize or glorify his own community, instead choosing to portray people of color as Boston commoners. When their eyes aren’t watching God, they are walking to work, parading in the paved road, dressing as best as they can, arguing on park benches and keeping abreast of current events, congregating in the dense traffic of “Columbus Avenue,” and interacting with the peculiar physical space in the urban landscape.

Some of his most effective paintings have a whiff of sentimental, nostalgic Currier & Ives about them, including a pair of humble scenes of South End street corners.

Allan Rohan Crite’s “The Handy Street Bridge.”

In “The Handy Street Bridge,” two boys patiently haul a pushcart filled with boards past brick residential blocks and old-style wooden buildings with clotheslines strung between windows. A leaning sign in a box-strewn backyard forbids dumping.

In “Come on Gramps,” another pair of boys urge a stooped elder to travel faster up a snow-covered city hill.

These are quotidian scenes, but they contain evidence of greater powers at work. A spirit of impatience crackles beneath the placid surface of Crite’s oils. There is a handsome, dignified city that isn’t exactly worn out, but it is still on its way out. Youthful residents push for transformation rather than piecemeal repair. In a place as lively and chaotic as Boston, change is inevitable, and Crite captures its scary velocity in a series of watercolor images of cranes, trucks, barrels, pulleys and barges at work.

What sort of community will be left once the machines have finished their dredging, lifting, and reassembling? Will the signal from God, steady as the bell of a streetcar, continue to resonate in the civic cathedral?

Crite is too canny to say it outright, but it is clear that he is worried. His love for Boston never diminishes, but if a viewer were to take these works chronologically, she might come to the conclusion that the painter has decided that his town is losing the cosmic plot.

It is meaningful that the group in “And the Lord Said,” painted in the early ‘30s, is listening attentively to the seated cobbler, while the crowd in the later “Thus Saith the Lord,” preoccupied with social life and other vanities, is mostly ignoring the standing preacher. By the end of World War II, the Madonna and Child can ride the MBTA and occasion nothing more than suspicious looks. Community cohesion is fraying. And since God has always been in the streets, and in the bricks, and in the window-boxes, and in the common bonds between everyday people, so is our lifeline to heaven — a place that looks, to Allan Rohan Crite, an awful lot like Boston, Massachusetts.

“Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood” can be seen at The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick through July 31. Visit zimmerli.rutgers.edu.

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