Paul Crotto was an American expatriate painter who built his entire artistic life in Europe, Paris, Florence, and the Mallorcan village of Deià, and whose career across more than six decades belongs to the small but distinct postwar tradition of American painters who chose Continental rather than New York lives.
Paul Crotto (1922, New York – 2016, Paris) was an American expatriate painter, sculptor, and printmaker, born in New York to Polish and German parents and the youngest of three children. He attended the University of Georgia as a freshman before being drafted into the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, and after special training at Harvard he served as a communications and coding officer in India, Chungking, and Shanghai. He began painting during his service in China and decided to pursue art seriously on his return; using the GI Bill, he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York and graduated in 1949.
He moved to Paris that year and studied at Fernand Léger's academy, and in 1950 traveled to Florence, where he spent two years at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze. Through the 1950s he worked at Atelier Lacourière in Montmartre, the Parisian print shop where he produced silkscreens and engravings and met Henri Matisse and Joan Miró. From the late 1950s onward he became a regular resident of the artistic colony in the village of Deià on Mallorca, gathered around the writer Robert Graves, and divided his year between Paris and Mallorca for the rest of his life.