NEW YORK—A sudden jump from relative obscurity to superstar status is nothing new in the art world, but the story of Martín Ramírez is unusual nonetheless. A Mexican immigrant long confined to mental hospitals in California, Ramírez, who died in 1963, has in the past two years shot to posthumous fame as one of the most celebrated outsider artists. The transition was catalyzed in large part by a retrospective of Ramírez’s work at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which ran from January to May 2007. That show received overwhelming critical praise: The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl called it “a marvel and a joy,” and Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times that the “transporting exhibition…should render null and void the insider-outsider distinction.”

The exhibition was also a success in another way, as it has led to the discovery of multiple troves of undocumented works by Ramírez. First, in 2007, nearly 140 previously unknown works by the artist, all done during the last three years of his life, were found in a garage in California. Twenty-five of these pieces will be shown at the Folk Art Museum’s follow-up, “Martín Ramírez: The Last Works,” which opens October 7 and runs through April 12, 2009. Several others are on view in a concurrent show at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York through November 29.

Then, this past January, 17 more never-before-exhibited drawings by the artist turned up at Sotheby’s, brought in by a retired art and special education teacher, Maureen Hammond, who was hoping to consign them for sale. Instead, the artworks have given rise to a bicoastal legal battle between Hammond and Ramírez’s heirs, and the sale has been put on hold.

Despite all this new attention, Ramírez’s story remains shrouded in mystery, even as his market increases and speculation abounds. On the eve of his new Folk Art Museum show, ARTINFO set out to make sense of his confused legacy.

Biography
[In conjunction with its 2007 retrospective, the Folk Art Museum undertook to set the record straight about Ramírez’s life. Sociologists Victor and Kristin Espinosa, who have researched the artist since the 1980s, compiled a chronology published in the catalogue for the show. It is among the most definitive records of the artist’s life and the basis for the majority of the information that follows.]

Martín Ramírez González was born on January 30, 1895, in Rincón de Velázquez, Mexico. He married María Santa Ana Navarro Velázquez in May of 1918, and the couple had three daughters, Juana, Teófila, and Agustina. On August 24, 1925, he left Mexico for the United States, looking for work, and in February of the following year, María gave birth to the couple’s only son, Candelario.

In California in the late 1920s, Ramírez worked on the railroad and in mines. Letters that he sent to his family with pictures in the margins also indicate that he began to draw around this time. But when the Great Depression hit, it left him homeless, and on January 9, 1931, the San Joaquin County police picked up a bewildered man who was unable to communicate. They committed him to Stockton State Hospital, where he was preliminarily diagnosed with manic depression.

In the following three years, Ramírez successfully escaped Stockton three times. The final time, however, he lived on the street for three or four days before returning voluntarily. During one of his stays in the hospital, in 1933, doctors diagnosed him with dementia praecox, catatonic form, a clinical term used to describe what we now know as catatonic schizophrenia.

From the mid-1930s on, Ramírez lived at Stockton and began to draw more regularly. The hospital sent some of his works to his family in Mexico, but the rest were thrown out by hospital staff or burned. In 1948, he was transferred to DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, where he met the psychologist Tarmo Pasto, who encouraged his art and brought him materials and supplies. In 1951, Pasto helped to organize an exhibition of Ramírez’s work at the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento. Pasto went on to organize three other solo shows for Ramírez in the next five years and also included his work in a group show of art by California mental hospital patients at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. In 1955, the psychologist sent ten of Ramírez’s drawings to James Johnson Sweeney, then director of the Guggenheim Museum, but never heard back. (A Guggenheim intern rediscovered them in the mid-1990s, and they were officially accessioned in 1997.)