© The Estate of Martín Ramírez, courtesy of Ricco/Maresca Gallery

Martín Ramírez, "Untitled (Rabbit Deer)" (c. 1960–63)

© The Estate of Martín Ramírez, photo by Ellen McDermott

Martín Ramírez, "Untitled (Riding Forward and Back)" (c. 1960–63)

Martín Ramírez Art Chicago Offers New Approach Editor’s Picks: Armory Modern Preview Works on Paper Fair Gets Off to Confident Start “Art Is Not an Investment” Fall Museum Shows in New York Legal Dispute Erupts Over Martin Ramirez Drawings Mad Skills

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Afterlife
As the man who had encouraged and saved Ramírez’s art, Pasto was left with the bulk of his patient’s output. In 1968, Chicago artist Jim Nutt came across some of the drawings in storage at Sacramento State College, where he was teaching and running the art gallery, and where Pasto was using the works as teaching aids. Nutt was taken with the work and a few years later, he and his dealer, Phyllis Kind, purchased most of Pasto's collection (by some accounts Pasto wanted the money to help send his son to medical school; by others he knew that the works needed conservation he couldn’t afford). For nearly two decades Nutt and his wife, artist Gladys Nilsson, deacidified and restored many of the drawings, occasionally loaning some out for exhibition. But it wasn’t until 1985 that a large group of them was shown together publicly in “The Heart of Creation: The Art of Martín Ramírez” at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.

The show, which included 61 pieces by the artist, traveled to Saskatchewan, Milwaukee, and Chicago and placed Ramírez’s work firmly on the art world map. (Roberta Smith wrote in her review of the 2007 Folk Art Museum show that “Ramírez changed my art-world view 21 years ago when I was invited to write an essay for [the Moore exhibition].”) It paved the way for the Folk Art Museum’s retrospective two decades later not only by raising the artist’s profile, but also by illustrating how little about the man himself was known; in her foreword for the show’s catalogue, curator Elsa Weiner Longhauser writes, “What little we know of Ramírez has been pieced together from disparate sources in an attempt to reconstruct a life that, for the most part, remains a mystery.” But Longhauser’s essay also demonstrates the proliferation of false information about Ramírez, incorrectly stating that the artist died in 1960 and that he was mute.

Discoveries
When the American Folk Art Museum organized its 2007 retrospective, it presented the most comprehensive biography of the artist to date alongside 97 of Ramírez’s roughly 300 known drawings and collages. Then, right around the time of the opening, a woman named Peggy Dunievitz e-mailed the museum to tell them that she was the daughter-in-law of a Dr. Max Dunievitz, who had worked as medical director of DeWitt in the early 1960s. “Max is no longer with us,” she wrote, “but for the years he worked there, he knew Martín and supplied him with colored pencils and things for his art, and as a consequence my mother-in-law has a collection of Martín’s drawings.” Thus a new cache of Ramírez works, some 140 of them, was discovered. As it turns out, Max had also organized the first posthumous showing of the artist’s work, which took place at DeWitt in 1963, just after his death.

In the wake of their discovery, the Dunievitz family decided to sell the drawings through New York’s Ricco/Maresca Gallery and use some of the money to honor Ramírez and his family by creating an education and arts foundation in his name. But, seeing the growing popularity of their patriarch, Ramírez’s heirs formed an estate, hired legal representation, and challenged the Dunievitzes’ ownership of the works. The families eventually negotiated an agreement, the outcome of which is the exclusive representation of the artist’s estate by Ricco/Maresca and a financial arrangement concerning the Dunievitz drawings. According to Eric Lieberman, a lawyer for the Ramírez family: “Any differences have been resolved, and the Ramírez family has an interest in all the works.”

Not so in the latest episode, which involves Maureen Hammond and the 17 drawings that she claims were given to her by Tarmo Pasto. By her account, she wrote the psychologist in 1961, when she was a graduate student studying art therapy, and he wrote back and sent a number of works by mental hospital patients, including Ramírez. When she contacted Sotheby’s last January to arrange a sale, two of the artist’s grandchildren, Maria Reyes Ramírez Miller and Martin Ramírez Salinas, led an intervention by the estate that, as with the Dunievitz situation, questioned the ownership of the works.