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.)

Around 1959, Pasto, who had since gone to Helsinki on a Fulbright fellowship, visited Ramírez for the last time. In 1963, the artist died at DeWitt of a pulmonary edema at the age of 68.

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.

But Hammond was unwilling to negotiate and filed a suit to prove her ownership, claiming that Miller and Salinas are “hiring two lawyers to troll the art world and squeeze money from their distant relation.” The next day, the heirs brought a case against Hammond and Sotheby’s (the house has since been dropped from the suit), saying that the drawings are rightfully theirs and arguing that Hammond and Pasto acted unlawfully in taking them. In lieu of the artwork, Miller and Salinas are asking for $3 million — a figure that, according to Lieberman, is based on a reasonable estimate of the pieces’ value.

While the works are still technically Hammond's, the central question before the court is one of rightful ownership — and, by extension, Ramírez’s true mental state. The artist’s heirs paint their grandfather as a victim of sorts, a man who was not in a position to give away his artwork as a gift. They cast Pasto’s taking of the art as an irresponsible, even illegal move. Lieberman says, “Because he was presumptively mentally incapacitated, and because he was involuntarily committed to a state institution, as a matter of law, no one in that institution could lawfully accept gifts from him — at least without judicial intervention permitting it.” Hammond’s lawyers, for their part, say that while Ramírez was involuntarily committed, that fact “has no bearing on his ability or mental capacity to make gifts.”

Both sides now say they are nearing an agreement, though they cannot offer details. In the meantime, the 17 drawings remain at Sotheby’s, and Ramírez remains something of a mystery. The judgments made about him in his lifetime have begun to be called into question, and not just by Hammond and her lawyers; the Folk Art Museum writes in its 2007 catalogue: “Interestingly, after Ramírez died, even Dr. Pasto questioned his diagnosis and suggested that the artist was not mentally ill.” Was Ramírez a schizophrenic or simply a depressed immigrant who didn’t speak English? Did he choose not to talk because he was a recluse, or because he felt no one would understand him? About all that can be agreed upon is the quality and value of his work, which may have been the way he wanted it — for us to remain silent and let the art do the talking.