Self Taught Primitive Painter Israel Litwak 1867 - 1952 Vase with Flowers collection Jim Linderman

Israel Litwak was born in Russia and immigrated to Brooklyn in 1903. After his long career as a cabinet maker, he began producing lively and unique drawings and paintings which he shared with the Brooklyn Museum. They gave him a one man show! He was included in the seminal book They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century. See a similar work (without peeping gentlemen) in the Brooklyn Museum collection HERE ISRAEL LITWAK UNTITLED (VASE WITH FLOWERS) 17 X 20 1940. COLLECTION JIM LINDERMAN / DULL TOOL DIM BULB

Victor Joseph Gatto Nude Woman Oil Painting on Board American Outsider Artist

"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