Victor Joseph Gatto Ink Drawing The Last Supper. collection Jim Linderman

Last Supper by Victor Joseph Gatto. Gatto was a bachelor and a former featherweight boxer who 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). I also have a cassette tape somewhere in which Gatto claims to be a better artist than Rousseau because he used more shades of green. The chickens in the foreground are a typical Gatto Move. Victor Joseph Gatto. Last Supper c. 1950 - 1955. Collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb #selftaughtart. #victorgatto. #folkart. #americanprimitive. #outsiderart.