Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1872-1946)

tempera, charcoal, gouache and ink on brown paper

Zeitlin and Ver Brugge, Los Angeles
Private Collection, Los Angeles (acquired from the above, circa 1973)

Mexico City, Museo Nacional de Arte, Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871-1946): Una Visión Retrospectiva, April-June, 1992, p. 181, no. 119, illustrated in color

The sheet is affixed to the mat intermittently along the edges. The back of the sheet is not visible as it is between the front and back of the mat. There is slight rippling to the paper consistent with the artist's use of medium and with the mounting. The colors are bright and the medium is in beautiful condition. Overall in excellent condition.
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Following a fourteen year sojourn in Paris, Alfredo Ramos Martínez returned to Mexico City in 1910 with  a renewed sense of commitment to the subject that had preoccupied his creative yearnings as early as his prodigious childhood—Mexico and its' people. It was this unique vision and philosophy that guided his leadership as Director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and later as founder of the remarkable network of experimental art schools known as the Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre. Ramos Martinez's eschewal of traditional academic teachings in favor of encouraging students to abandon the confines of the studio and paint from life in the streets and fields of Mexico's cities and villages would play a defining role in reforming the National Art System. Likewise his teachings influenced a new generation of artists—from David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera to Rufino Tamayo—key figures in the history of Mexican modern art.

 

Obliged to leave Mexico in 1929 in order to seek medical care for his ailing daughter, the Ramos Martínez family relocated to Los Angeles in 1929 where the artist would live the remainder of his life. And, while the move forced him to resign his post at the school, life in California, despite the personal crisis, marked a period of enormous artistic and professional flourishing. Creatively reenergized, Ramos Martínez yet again reintroduced in his work the image of the humble Indian at work, at prayer, and at other moments that exalt traditional familial and cultural values. In works such as La niña de las flores blancas, the artist's approach to his subject is one of profound reverence and respect. And while the figures depicted are no doubt intended as types, rather than portraits, he succeeds exponentially in expressing with great tenderness their humanity and dignity. Likewise, while Ramos Martínez's geometrizing tendencies suggests his acquaintance with such vanguard art practices as Cubism and Art Deco, the choice of subject matter is intrinsically Mexican. The lovely flower seller here depicted emerges almost organically from a wall of foliage formed by the clusters of blossoms and leaves of a "trumpet tree" –a tree indigenous to Mexico and popular throughout Southern California. The young woman's delicate features and posture are framed by her surroundings while the verticality of her long braids connect her to the earth as do the two beautiful magnolia flowers she grasps in her hands in a gesture of offering to the viewer. Her arms and hands appear to sprout from the soil below asserting a sense of spiritual and earthly connection to the land and the divine force it embodies.

 

While thriving creatively in California, the 1930s also coincided with several important exhibitions, most notably at The Los Angles County Art Museum, the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and the Fine Arts Foundation at Scripps College. Likewise Ramos Martínez's paintings resonated well with collectors, including many Hollywood personalities and industry insiders, such as Beulah Bondi, Corinne Griffith, Edith Head, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jimmy Stewart. Several mural commissions followed including a series of panels for the Margaret Fowler Memorial Garden at Scripps College in Claremont and a stained-glass window project for St. John's Catholic Church in Los Angeles completed posthumously as per the artist's instructions following his passing on November 8, 1945.