A Narrative in Crayon and Collage
 Augusta Dwyer - The Star
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| | Martin Ramirez is an enigma. For decades, he was classified as one of the three greatest “outsider” artists of contemporary American art, but next to nothing was known about him. | |
Tepatitlán, Mexico – When Martín Ramírez set off for the United States in 1925, he left his wife, Ana, with three small children, another on the way, 20 hectares of land he had yet to pay for and the promise to send back money. And while he made good on his word for several years, historical events and personal crises were to push him toward an incredible trajectory of hardship, incarceration in mental institutions and eventual redemption through art.
As the stories of average Mexicans become increasingly those of leaving and being left behind, Ramírez's life in many ways illuminates Mexico's central drama: lack of economic opportunities, emigration and the ensuing separation from society, culture and family.
For Nobel-winning Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, Ramírez was "an emblem. The contradictory currents that animated his life ... dramatically portray the situation of Hispanic communities."
Paz was writing for the catalogue of a 1987 exhibit of Hispanic artists in Houston that featured Ramírez and was to travel to Mexico two years later. It initiated a gradual process of re-approximation between Ramírez, who died in 1963, and the family he never saw again.
ATANCIO RAMÍREZ TORRES was 17 when his father saw a TV commercial for the Mexican exhibit. "He said to us, Look, it's my uncle. It's my uncle Martín,'" Torres recalled. The notion that their relative was suddenly a famous artist "was a shock for everyone," he said.
Today Torres works in the treasury department of Tepatitlán, a city of 86,000 proud of its elaborate 17th century churches, its conservative politics and its entrepreneurial ethos. Much of that is connected with the presence of family members in the U. S., as Jalisco state as a whole receives $2 billion a year in remittances. "About 20 per cent of the population emigrates," said Ramírez Torres, "and they have for over a century." Many of Ramírez's direct descendants have also emigrated and now live in California.
For young men like Martín Ramírez, the urge to travel north was common, as were arduous jobs he found on the Texas railways and in northern California mines. Yet within a year, Jalisco had become the site of bloody battles between the secular, post-Revolution government of the time and an army of religious zealots known as the Cristeros. By 1929, these took the lives of 250,000 people.
"I think the most important topic in Ramírez's art was being far away and knowing that his family was in the middle of this war," said Ramírez biographer Victor Espinosa. What's more, a letter from his brother led him to believe that his wife had been unfaithful to him.
During the Great Depression, jobs in the U.S. dried up, and a million Mexicans and Americans of Mexican descent were deported. In 1931, Ramírez was picked up, ragged and apparently delusional, by police in Stockton, Calif., jailed for two days, then sent to Stockton State hospital where he was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia.
For Espinosa, it was "a very clear case of racism. And his was not the only case. If you look at the records of the hospitals in those years, they had a huge percentage of immigrants," he said. Records show that Ramírez attempted to escape the crowded, inhuman conditions at Stockton various times, until around 1935, he began to draw.
Using paper, magazine pages, burnt matchsticks and crayons retrieved from the garbage, Ramírez began to create pictures portraying a recurring series of themes: trains, horsemen, Madonnas and animals typical of the Mexican landscape. Most of it was thrown away. Even his eldest daughter Juanita, who told Espinosa that, "these drawings had meaning for me, because they showed me that my father missed his family and his animals, and his life in Mexico," was prohibited by her mother from hanging them inside their house. Instead she hung them on the walls outside where they were eventually ruined by the elements.
Feeling abandoned by her husband, and ashamed of his committal, said Espinosa, Ana Ramírez avoided talking about him with her younger children, including the son born after he left.
The only relative who did visit him was his nephew, José Gómez Ramírez, now 86. A field worker contracted under the 1942 Bracero Program, Gómez spent 34 years travelling back and forth between his home and California. Often working a seven-day week, "I picked celery, cabbage and lettuce," he said. "I drove the cultivator, planted, harvested, packaged vegetables, everything."
The money he earned allowed Gómez to support his family, build the house where he still lives in Tepatitlán, and pay for his disabled younger son's medical bills.
In 1952, Gómez was given a pass to visit Ramírez at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, where he had been moved three years earlier. "And he wasn't crazy," he said. "He was fine and he spoke well." Yet when asked if he wanted to come home, "he said he would never return," said Gómez. "He said, 'Tell Ana I will see her in the Valley of Jehosephat.' "
It was at DeWitt where Ramírez's obsessive drawing was noticed and championed by Tarmo Pasto, a Sacramento psychologist interested in the convergence between artistic creativity and mental illness. Eight years after Ramírez's death, Chicago artist Jim Nutt persuaded Pasto to sell his collection of about 300 drawings. Nutt's art dealer, Phyllis Kind, began to market Ramírez's work, and over the years, admiration for it gradually grew to the point where he was no longer considered an interesting example of a mentally-ill, self-taught painter, or outsider artist, but an artistic genius in his own right.
It is only one of the many paradoxes of Ramírez's history, that while his grandchildren always denied that he was insane, in order to reclaim his drawings, their lawyer had to argue that he was when he gave them away to Pasto and hospital staff.
In out of court settlements, the family recently succeeded in recovering 144 drawings found by a daughter-in-law of DeWitt's medical director, Max Dunievitz, in her garage in 2007, as well as 17 given to art therapist Maureen Hammond by Pasto in 1961.
Those drawings are now worth between $50,000 and $300,000 apiece, of which the Ramírez estate – one surviving daughter, and 21 grandchildren on both sides of the border – "own a significant interest," according to family lawyer Eric Lieberman.
WITH WORKS FROM THE Dunievitz trove currently on display at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the burnishing of Ramírez's reputation as an artist has been nothing short of phenomenal. In a review of an earlier retrospective, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith called Ramírez "simply one of the best artists of the 20th century," comparing him to Paul Klee and Saul Steinberg.
"Great art can never be confined to the boxes art history gives it," said American Folk Art Museum curator Brooke Anderson. "What you're really talking about is the art historical canon and our need to compartmentalize and organize creativity, so that we can understand it and tell a particular story."
Using his connections in municipal government, Ramírez Torres plans to have his great-uncle's remains returned for reburial in Tepatitlán, which the family simply couldn't afford in 1963.
Aside from setting up a foundation, he also wants a room dedicated to him in the City Museum, a baroque, pastel-painted building, where photocopies of Ramírez's presciently modern artworks will make a huge contrast with its collection of sacred art and local landscapes.
For Gómez, who has two children living in the United States, the contradiction of leaving family in order to give them a better life remains vivid. His wife, Maria, died while he was away, and returning to find her gone "was very sad," he said. "That's the great fear everyone has when you go," he added, "to come back home and find your loved ones are no longer there." |
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Vallarta Living | Art Talk | December 2008 
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