Martín Ramírez

by Brooke Davis Anderson

Martin Ramirez (1895-1963), the great self-taught draftsman of the twentieth century, left his native Los Altos de Jalisco, Mexico, in 1925 to find work in the United States and support his wife and children back home. Political struggles in Mexico and the economic consequences of the Great Depression left him stranded, jobless and homeless, on the streets of California in 1931. Unable to communicate in English and apparently confused, he was soon detained by the police and committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he would eventually be diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. Ramirez hardly talked to anybody during those thirty-two years. Instead, he began to assemble found bits of paper--candy wrappers, greeting cards, flattened paper cups, hospital supply forms, and book pages, for example--using a self-made glue to create large surfaces for drawing. Sketched in graphite, colored pencil, or crayon, and often collaged with magazine illustrations, the artist's drawings range in size from several inches up to twelve feet. He was a master of pictorial space, using dramatic shifts in depth and scale to create a field in which multiple perspectives coexist. Ramirez's art depicts a variety of subjects, including caballeros, Madonnas, animals, trains, and tunnels. Memory and experience seep through each composition. While one strong component of Ramirez's work is the imagery of Mexico, another is an aesthetic found in the culture of mental illness. Martin Ramirez is the first book to give equal consideration to the biographical, historical, and cultural influences in Ramirez's oeuvre, its artistic quality and merit, and its standing in the context of the work of twentieth-century self-taught artists. An interdisciplinary exploration of Ramirez's life and complex, multilayered artwork, it presents a holistic examination of his drawings and collages beyond the boundaries of his diagnosed schizophrenia.

Genres: Art

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I caught this show in New York a couple years ago. I had always heard him put beside Henry Darger and Adolph Wolfli as the three giants of outsider art, so when I found out about the show I had to see it.

At first I was put off by the repetitive obsessiveness of his work, he basically had 3 or 4 subjects he drew over and over; it actually made me physically uncomfortable, almost frightened me; but then something happened and I was taken by his drawings almost to the source of creative experience itself.

One of his subjects is trains exiting and going into tunnels, and it was these drawings in particular that resonated with me; the train like some mythic creative force emerging from darkness. There's something childlike but also sophisticated about the drawings that make them even more potent.

Of course the bio included as one of the texts is fascinating/heartbreaking.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw his show at the American Folk Art Museum a few years ago and my Mom was nice enough to buy me a copy of the book when she remembered how much I liked it. The work is great and speaks for itself but the essays that open it are a bit exhaustive and repetitive in their analysis when not covering the important historical and biographical background. Maybe this comes from me not having read much art criticism, but a lot of the statements seemed obvious or irrelevant to me.

[Siobhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Warrants a one-off trip to the Midwest.

[Nancy]

This artist is now one of my favorites. Well deserved artist for a stamp.