Before becoming an artist in his mid-forties, Victor Joseph Gatto led a rough-and-tumble life. He worked in New York City as a boxer, a plumber, and a steamfitter and received a dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Navy for desertion. A series of menial jobs followed nearly ten years in prison for robbery and attempted escape. In 1938, out of work because of a hernia, Gatto walked past a sidewalk art show in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and learned that amateur painters were asking hundreds of dollars for a painting. Confident that he could be a superior artist, Gatto immediately bought materials and set to work creating intense scenes of jungles and cityscapes. His timing could not have been better; the artworld was just discovering the work of naive painters, and Gatto’s work was exhibited in galleries and purchased by museums and celebrities. His pugnacious attitude toward dealers and supporters and his inability to manage his money, however, continued to stand in the way of financial security. Gatto lived out his life in furnished rooms in New York, and in raffish Miami Beach hotels.

Gatto’s work is full of incident and strong emotion, as is evident in scenes of World War II, the struggles of the labor movement, dog races, and exotic landscapes. While he was often drawn to scenes of conflict, he also painted the cultivated fields of utopian planets. In Jungle Scene Gatto swirled wet paint into wet paint to create a dark and impenetrable thicket. Beneath tangled vegetation that blocks out the sky, an elephant and a giraffe are surrounded by a ring of tigers ready to attack. Incapable of saving themselves, the elephant and giraffe stand back to back, in terrible isolation from each other.

Cheryl Rivers, "Jungle Scene," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 375.