Antonio Gattorno

Antonio Gattorno was born in Havana, Cuba, on March 15, 1904. He began formal training at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana around 1916, at about age twelve, studying under the academic painter Leopoldo Romanach. In 1919, still a student, he won a Cuban government scholarship that funded several years of study in Europe. He spent roughly 1919 to 1927 based mainly in Rome, Spain, and Paris, copying Italian primitives, absorbing the modern painting he encountered in Paris, and forming friendships with artists including Georges Rouault and Jules Pascin.

He returned to Cuba in the mid to late 1920s and became a central figure of the Vanguardia, the generation that broke from academic tradition to build a modern Cuban painting language. His paintings of guajiros, the rural poor whites of Cuba, won him the First Prize at the Primer Salon Nacional de Pintura y Escultura in Havana in 1934 and again at the Segundo Salon Nacional in 1937. In 1935 a monograph of thirty six of his works was published in Havana with texts by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Ramon Guirao, and Alejo Carpentier, among others; Esquire reprinted Hemingway's essay in May 1936 with additional commentary from Dos Passos.

Hemingway and Dos Passos also sponsored Gattorno's first American solo exhibition, at the Georgette Passedoit Gallery in New York in January and February 1936, a critical and commercial success that marked his North American debut. That same year he won the Watson F. Blair Purchase Prize at the Art Institute of Chicago's fifteenth International Watercolor Exhibition. By the late 1930s he had settled primarily in the United States, and his subject matter shifted from creole rural themes toward surrealism. He exhibited again at the Passedoit Gallery in 1944, and in 1946 his work was shown at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and the San Francisco Museum of Art. A 1949 solo exhibition at the Galleria dello Zodiaco in Rome again carried texts by Dos Passos and Hemingway. He also taught at his old school, the Academia de San Alejandro.

Gattorno's final major exhibition was a retrospective spanning sixty years of work, held at the Southeastern Massachusetts University Gallery in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, from October 2 to 22, 1978. He died on April 5, 1980, in Massachusetts. Wikipedia gives the town as New Bedford, while the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba and an Italian exhibition catalogue give the neighboring town of Acushnet.

Gattorno's early American reputation rested substantially on Ernest Hemingway's advocacy. Hemingway wrote favorably about Gattorno's guajiro subjects in the text accompanying the 1935 Havana monograph, later reprinted in Esquire in May 1936, praising how the paintings captured the poverty and isolation of Cuba's rural poor. Reviewing his 1936 Passedoit Gallery debut, New York Times critic Howard Devree likewise wrote approvingly of the lyricism and human sympathy in Gattorno's portrayal of humble subjects. Cuban and Cuban American scholarship since has treated him as one of the founders of the Vanguardia and, in later decades, a still underrecognized figure of twentieth century Cuban modernism, whose turn toward surrealism after the late 1930s remains less studied than his early guajiro paintings.

Gattorno's auction market is small and infrequent relative to his historical standing. The highest publicly documented price is USD 83,000, paid for Sorrentine Dancer (1948) at Bonhams' Modern and Contemporary Cuban Art online sale on February 11, 2025, more than double its low estimate. A more typical result is the USD 16,250 paid at Heritage Auctions on December 10, 2024, for a work whose title was not specified in the available sale record. No current gallery or estate representation for Gattorno could be confirmed as of this writing; sales instead surface through occasional Latin American and Cuban art auctions at major houses.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Gattorno. The closest thing to a scholarly reference is the 1935 Havana monograph illustrating thirty six works, supplemented by exhibition catalogues from his Passedoit Gallery, San Francisco, and Rome shows. His auction history is thin, with only a handful of documented public sales, so a single result such as the 2025 Sorrentine Dancer sale should be read as a data point rather than a stable benchmark. His clearest institutional anchor is the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba in Havana, which holds his work and situates him within the Vanguardia; a Museum of Modern Art artist page also exists, though collectors should confirm the nature of any MoMA holding directly with the museum before relying on it. Because no current gallery or estate is confirmed to represent him, provenance research and direct exhibition history remain the most reliable path to verification.