Victor Joseph Gatto

Victor Joseph Gatto

“A hard luck guy," was how he described himself, and with good reason.
Gatto was born in 1893 in a New York City tenement. At age four his mother died and his laborer father put him and four brothers into an orphanage until his father remarried four years later.  Gatto loved his stepmother and remained close until she died in 1944.  He was raised as a Catholic and went to the fifth-grade level when he left school to work. The only jobs he held were unskilled and low paying. He became a professional feather weight boxer in 1913, with some thirty fights in six years.  His brother John, was a criminal and Joe was imprisoned for a robbery he did not do. He tried to escape twice.

In 1938, Gatto met some exhibitors at a Greenwich Village art show and was told one could earn $600 for a single painting.  Gatto decided to become an artist himself.  At age forty-five, he began to paint with no artistic background except drawing in school.  He liked to tell that Teddy Roosevelt had once visited his classroom and declared him “the best drawer in the school”.
By 1940, he had been discovered by collectors of modern primitives and someone declared him New York’s Rousseau. In 1943, the Charles Barzansky Gallery gave him a one-man show which was a triumph. Over the years, his work was bought and exhibited by major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Detroit Institute of Arts..
Gatto was a man of bright and dark sides.  He was befriended by artists Sterling and Dorothy  Strauser,  who assisted Gatto with summers in the Poconos;  Ivan Black, the publicist who first brought Gatto to the attention of the Barzanskys, boarded him for a year at his Woodstock home;  and the Barzanskys who promoted him.  But he was an abrasiveness tough who would verbally abuse and misuse such friends.  Still supporters said he could be sweet and generous, “always ready to give money to people down on their luck" said Strauser.
Gatto died at seventy-one in Miami on May 27, 1965