Insider/Outsider The Art of Martin Ramirez

[Brookside]

Ghost No More



Martin Ramirez’s life story is about as bleak and compelling as fate could hand anyone.
The first link covers his personal history,part of it unknown until now, in a recently published article in the New York Times.
The second is a critical overview of his work by NYT’s art critic Roberta Smith who has long admired the drawing’s of Martin Ramirez and sets them into context.
I’ve been fortunate enough in my days as a student to see many of these works when they came to Chicago and were initially exhibited at the Phyllis Kind Gallery.
They caused a stir then, and the new exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum is sure to raise interest in him beyond his status within the art world.

Outsider To His Kin But a Ghost No More Kathryn Shattuck NYT
Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/ar...tml?ref=design


a favorite motif: horse and rider

excerpt from Roberta Smith's article published today 1/26/007
"American Folk Art Museum’s transporting exhibition of the scroll-like drawings of the Mexican artist Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) should render null and void the insider-outsider distinction.


Ramírez, who created the roughly 300 drawings that make up his known work between 1948 and 1963 while confined to a mental hospital in Northern California, is simply one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He belongs to the group of accessible, irresistible genius draftsmen that includes Paul Klee, Saul Steinberg and Charles Schulz. Well selected and beautifully installed by Brooke Davis Anderson, a curator at the folk art museum, this show of 97 drawings, some mural-size, is the first museum exhibition of Ramírez’s work in New York and one of the best shows of the season.

Outsider art is often conveniently artist-free; it has been made by someone who is, as the term implies, on the margins — poor, uneducated, nonwhite, mentally ill, dead or otherwise inaccessible. All this makes for an aura of purity and innocence, but also a blankness. The work becomes a vessel, open to interpretation, in need of protection and available for a reverential possession and habitation that is almost a form of colonialism. This exhibition counters such possession by suggesting that Ramírez’s art was, like all great art, typically site-specific, that is, firmly rooted in real experiences and memories that he reshaped and distilled according to his needs and talents. The more we know about this artist, the clearer it becomes that we are just beginning to fathom his extraordinary achievement.




“Martín Ramírez” continues through April 29 at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 265-1040. It will also be seen at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Oct. 6 through Jan. 6, 2008.


Outside InRoberta Smith NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/ar...gn/26rami.html


Stag, Doe and Fawn.
I can’t think of a more compelling image of separation than this Martin Ramirez drawing.
The distance dividing the deer is metaphorical, not literal, in lieu of Ramirez’s confinement away from his family.

[Brookside]

Martin Ramirez circa 1950-53

BROKEN ANGEL

by Jerry Saltz/Village Voice


Martín Ramírez, Jan. 23-April 29, 2007, at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, New York N.Y. 10019

Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) is the 20th-century Fra Angelico. Like the 15th-century sainted Italian who combined elements of Medieval art with nascent Renaissance styles, thereby transforming them into something ravishingly new and forceful, Ramírez extended a mosaic of visual traditions, among them, Mexican folk painting, Spanish liturgical woodblocks, movie magazines, travel posters, vernacular Mexican church architecture and carved Madonnas from his home parish. In the process Ramírez created something transcendently powerful, beautiful and new. Not only is Ramírez the best of the so-called "Self-Taught" or "Outsider" artists -- baldly limiting, not to mention bogus categories considering that on some level all artists are self-taught -- but he ranks as among the greatest artists of the 20th century, along with three other so-called "outsiders," Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger and Bill Traylor.

For a glimpse of an angelic visual energy and earthy intensity, treat yourself to the "Martín Ramírez" retrospective at the American Folk Art Museum. Impeccably organized and installed in this sadly- broken-up, narrow building by the museum’s messianically dedicated director and curator, Brooke Davis Anderson, this survey rescues Ramírez from the "Outsider" category, presenting nearly 90 works grouped thematically and stylistically. The show establishes that rather than being some easy-to-feel-sorry-for illiterate, insane, mute, Mexican holy-man, Ramírez was literate, sane and a brilliant draftsman who skillfully melded biography, history, hope, religion and tragedy.



The tragedy began on August 24, 1925, when Ramírez, then 30, left his wife and four children in central Mexico to find work in the United States. For six years he labored on the railroads and mines of northern California. Then, in January 1931 Ramirez’s world collapsed. Not speaking any English and suffering in the throes of the Great Depression, Ramírez was picked up by police as a vagrant. He was then misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, catatonic and manic depressive, and committed to California’s Stockton State Hospital. There, he spent the next 17 years of his life. In 1948, he was transferred to DeWitt State Hospital, also in northern California, where he remained until the day he died in 1963. He never saw his wife and family or the outside world again.

The esthetic part of this 32-year season in hell began in 1949 when, by an act of art-historical grace, Tarmo Pasto, a gifted psychologist working at DeWitt, fell under the spell of Ramírez’s art and began saving it. After amassing around 300 works and arranging several exhibitions of Ramírez’s work, Pasto left DeWitt to teach at Sacramento State College. There, he made Ramírez’s drawings available to other teachers for art and art history courses. In the fall of 1968, artist Jim Nutt happened across these drawings. Utterly floored, he contacted his art dealer, Phyllis Kind, and the two of them arranged to purchase almost all of the Ramírez works from Pasto. The two Chicagoans then set about restoring the drawings and diligently spread the word. In one last bittersweet twist, however, Ramírez’s grand-daughters saw their relative’s art for the first time only the day before this retrospective opened last month, and according to a recent New York Times article, no one in the Ramírez family has ever made a dime from this work.

Ramírez’s genius is a confluence of stylistic influences, pictorial inventiveness, private musing and sheer visual revelry. Although he is a great linear artist, his regularly repeating and parallel, careful-but-not-fussy lines form enticingly beautiful, powerfully built pictorial wholes that congeal into supple undulating or radiating masses. Everything seems to emit a glow that is at once otherworldly but also very much part of the world. Interweaving elements of abstraction, naturalism, ornamentalism, calligraphy, modernist collage and visionary verve, Ramírez’s art has a way of being asymmetrically symmetrical -- compositions are balanced bi-laterally, but not quite; things on the left often repeat whatever is on the right, but not exactly. This is why his drawings rarely collapse into bull’s-eye neutrality or deadening equilibrium. Like many early woodblocks, or even Ingres’ riveting Napoleon Enthroned in Majesty, Ramírez’s work exudes a shocking frontality. His space is at once modern, pre-modern, flat, illusionistic and fanciful: cave painting by way of illuminated manuscripts.



Link to complete article:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/fea...ltz2-20-07.asp