Victor Joseph Gatto Outsider Artist "The American Primitive" Painting of a Young Woman

"Most of Gatto's paintings—scenes of everyday life in New York, exotic cultures, historical events, and tropical episodes —are packed with endless detail built up with many layers of minute brushstrokes. Gatto, a bachelor and a former featherweight boxer, lived with his widowed stepmother in the section of New York known as "Little Italy." Painters Elaine and Willem De Kooning lived in the next apartment in the late 1930s, and Elaine De Kooning and other artists encouraged Gatto's painting. His work received critical acclaim through several exhibitions in New York galleries during the 1940s and 1950s, his most productive period."  Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990)

Oil on Board c. 1950 Collection Jim Linderman

Gatto in the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gatto papers at Syracuse University  

The Art and Times of Victor Joseph Gatto in the Clarion 1988
Text in full begins on page 58 HERE