PAINTER ON PAINTER by Sterling Strauser Sterling Strauser is an American artist who is an authority on twentieth centuryfolk artists, many of whom he discovered. Here, he discusses the work of his long-time friend, Victor Joseph Gatto, who spent many summers with him and his wife, Dorothy, in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. For years,critics regarded self-taught painters the way doctors regard faith healers. But Joe Gatto proved to me that a naive painter's work can be profound. His painting of God creating man is a great example of this. No other artist that I know of has done this subject with quite the same concept. No matter what your religion, you get his message. Gatto believed absolutely in the story of Genesis. You can't paint this way unless you believe in what you're painting. He was a natural. He didn't know any of the academic rules, but he made his paintings work. Take his use of perspective, for instance. Some naive painters, once they learn a little about it, use perspective to punch holes in their canvases. They ruin the plane oftheir picture this way. But Gatto never did this. When you look at a horizon in a Gatto painting, it belongs there, but for no apparent reason. There is not the usual academic change of values from foreground to middle ground to distance, so that an atmospheric haze is depicted. He seems to have willed the horizon into place. His command ofthe medium was amazing. He could work with a small brush in fine detail, or with a large brush and cover the canvas quickly. He could go from an eight by ten inch canvas to one three by four feet. And his handling of paint on either size would be masterful. There would be the same pizzaz, the same elan. His courage and his belief in himself allowed him to tackle any subject. When he first came to visit us in 1942, he asked me what I wanted him to paint. I asked for a dark jungle with some animals. He sat down and did one with a lion and a giraffe. It was a revelation. He worked with a large brush, swiping across the canvas in great streaks. He was exerting himself, breathing hard, giving it everything he had. He was capable ofsuch sustained effort. He'd work all night long if you kept the coffee pot going. I've always had the feeling that he was a true genius. I've known many talented folk artists, but he was more than talented. Something gave him an inner eye that was more intense than most. The French critic Tarnapol, who was also a great collector of French art, said he was one of the ten Americans whose work would live. Other critics have compared him to Rousseau, but in my opinion there's a vast difference between them. Rousseau paints an idealized world, while Gatto's paintings have an infernal intensity running through them. They're the work of a man who knows the law ofthe jungle. You don't sense this in Rousseau's snake charmers and sleeping gypsies. He was so determined not to be considered what he called a set-up artist — someone who painted from photos or models. He insisted on doing it from his own inner vision. This same insistence seemed to carry over into his everyday personality. It was blood, sweat and tears when you had him for the summer. He wanted all your time. When I couldn't quite give this to him, he would go up and down Main Street calling me all kinds of names — phoney, chiseler, punk. Then, by next summer, I would be his best friend again. He would shadowbox during dinner at our house and knock over the silverware. No wonder my daughter said that when she got old enough to have a boyfriend she hoped it would be someone interested in anything except art.
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front Park and Biscayne Bay. Not that there weren't those who helped him, or tried to. He could always count on a meal and conversation at the tiny Greenwich Village walkup of his friends, Lou and Lillian Codina. Fellow-painter Sterling Strauser, an early admirer, and his wife, Dorothy, residents of East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, did their best to make Gatto comfortable during various summers in the country near the Delaware Water Gap. In the mid-Fifties, Ivan Black, the publicist with a fine arts degree from Harvard, who had first brought Gatto to the attention of the Barzansky Gallery, boarded him for a year at his Woodstock, New York home. Gatto even found occasional residence in the Pennsylvania home of John, the brother he accused offraming him, whom he professed to hate ("for all the things he done to me"), and whose housekeeper was at one time madam of one of John's brothels. Invariably, these visits ended in disharmony. No matter what the sacrifices made or inconveniences suffered by his hosts, Gatto would leave in anger, convinced that because things weren't going entirely his way he was somehow being taken advantage of. Eventually, when he needed to, he would return, just as if nothing had happened. He was suspicious of almost everyone. His first dealers, Charles and Bess Barzansky, who advanced him money when they couldn't afford to, and readily gave him exhibitions when he sent them sufficient paintings, had to contend with his third-party complaints, delivered with scarcely-bridled antiSemitism, about their alleged stinginess and chicanery. Friends and admirers like Sterling Strauser and Ivan Black were also complained of. He was,if you gave credence to his claims, continually cheated, abused, insulted, taken for a fool. And there were those on whom he, even in his fifties, would use an ex-pugilist's still deadly fists. Among those who knew him, agreement is general that Gatto was his own worst ambassador. The Clarion