Alfred Levitt interviewed for NPR

The documentary begins with the standard premise that the filmmakers, having found a colorful character, need to build a cinematic pedestal to highlight and amplify the subject’s life affirming qualities.  Time and reflection, however, cast their own baleful eye on these efforts, intruding with a simple question:  Is this man really as great as he appears to be?  Alfred Levitt: In Three Acts is about ego, self-reflection and self-importance; and, ultimately, how one is perceived by others, and by history.

The filmmakers stumbled on Levitt, in 1995, while doing research for a documentary on Jack London.  London had passed away in 1916, so the odds of finding anyone with first-hand knowledge were slim at best – until Levitt came along.  He had attended lectures given by the famous author.

In many ways Levitt was the last of a generation: a self-educated working-class activist/artist.  His true passion was painting and he befriended many art notables of the twentieth century, including Margaret Sutton and Pablo Picasso.  Although he struggled for recognition, Levitt never gave up on what he saw as the purity of his art.  And these same sensibilities provided a context for his political thinking and his embrace of the purest of political philosophies: anarchism.  Emma Goldman, who took young Levitt under her wing, employed him as an office boy for her radical newspaper, Mother Earth.

Alfred Levitt was born in a small town in Ukraine, one of fourteen children of a Jewish carriage maker.  Surviving the pogrom of 1905, the family immigrated to the U.S.  Levitt, aged 17, was quickly caught in the embrace of a then thriving art community, centered on the anarchist-influenced Modern School in Manhattan.  Honing his techniques under the tutelage of teachers like Hans Hoffman, his work, by the 1930’s, reflected a growing concern with the European fascist threat.  During this period, Levitt became part of a flourishing art scene that included Marcel Duchamp, whom he shared another passion with: chess.  But by the 1940's Levitz’s style changed, from political to lyrical, influenced by summers spent in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His watercolors of this small fishing village would become some of his better-known works.

Growth and Fruition, 1951

Levitt was also the consummate sportsmen, traveled frequently to Europe where he explored the caves of France and Spain, and developed an interest in prehistoric cave painting.  He also developed a passion for the uniquely French game of pétanque (a bit like the Italian bocce ball). So taken with the sport, he was instrumental in the construction of two courts in Washington Square Park, where he proceeded to build his own reputation as a skillful practitioner. They remain there today, as a testament to his all-around love of life and passion for the undiscovered.

But was this Alfred, in ACT ONE, a little too good to be true?  Questions begged to be answered. Why wasn't he a better known artist?  After all, according to his own count, he had forty paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

ACT TWO provides revelation… with close friends, after his death, revealing bits and pieces of a bigger story.  Alfred was a braggart, an egomaniac and certainly his relationships with women were caught up in a web of misogyny and deprecation.  Alfred, according to his close friends, was his own worst enemy.