Shelly Horton and Ramos Martinez
working on the mural, 1946
ARM: MODERNISMO & MODERNITY
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For Alfredo Ramos Martinez, modernity and Modernismo are the parameters of his personal state of being. His early years in Mexico, his youthful criticism of the Academy, his interest in natural light, his fascination with everyday things, all lead him toward a modern vision encouraged by his European years.
In Europe he finds himself in a city that looks toward the modern with its galeries, its broad boulevards created by Baron Haussman. There he also experiences the revolution that is sweeping through the arts. And of course, it is there that he meets Rubén Darío.
Darío opened the doors to the other face of modernity, modernismo. A freedom of imagination, a recapitulation of mythological worlds of sprites, shepherdesses, and cyclical and magical rituals that lead to a world of female power, the world of the goddess and the siren.
The interaction between painter and poet, a quasi-symbiotic relationship of writing and painting, enrich and support the young painter. His modernista paintings of nymphs dancing through fields of flowers, of processions of sprites making flower offerings and of sensual, mysterious women leap from the real to the fantastic, from the philosophical to the erotic. Ramos, like Darío and the Latin American poets of that time and space, continues to explore the infinite horizons of the imagination.
California is, of course, the turning point, the point of reference. By distancing himself from Mexico at the end of the twenties, and from an environment that is slowly becoming more narrow under the weight of self-interests, Alfredo Ramos Martinez creates a new Mexican art drawn from the Mexico of memory, but enriched by his understanding of a cultural past (Europe) and a new cultural space (Los Angeles). That understanding of a past within a present that looks forward is what Ramos' work reveals. Modern and modernista, the world we find in Ramos Martinez's work takes Mexican art past its borders and toward a new universal space.
The Paintings and Frescoes of Alfredo Ramos Martinez
For many reasons, the past fifty years have been the most eventful and revolutionary ones in art history. There have been any number of artists whose names seem to symbolize a movement in modern art. Some of these movements and contributions have been much more important and of wider and more lasting influence than others. Among the many discoveries and contributions which have led to creative schools, particularly in the United States, are two of special significance coming to us from Mexico. First the methods and results of the creative teaching of children and young people and secondly the mighty impact of a school of mural painting or architectural wall decoration. The part played by Alfredo Ramos Martinez in all of this can hardly be over estimated, since he was in a large measure the originating spirit. Specifying this function of Martinez is not to by any means overlook his importance as a creative painter.
Except for a very few artist-teachers, working more or less in isolation, there was almost no widespread teaching of the young which was of interpretative value. As has been noted several times, the results achieved by Martinez in his organization of classes for youthful students in his capacity as Director of the Academy of Bellas Artes marked a turning point in the contemporary art of Mexico. The results again engaged the serious interest of well-known European painters such as Picasso and Foujita. Exhibitions were held in Paris and Madrid which were received with wide acclaim. Mingling with some of the ideals already established by Austrian educators such as Franz Cizek and the American, Arthur Wesley Dow, teachers and educators in our own country were even further stimulated by the striking creative work that came out of the Mexican schools under Martinez's leadership. This was further accentuated by this definitive and personal style of this artist's own work.
Illustrating his persuasive point of view were his compositions painted on newspapers and first discovered for the public through the enthusiasm of Zuloaga, the noted Spanish painter. Nor should it be overlooked that Martinez was one of the very first men to make the world outside of Mexico acquainted with the great wealth of pictorial beauty inherent in the everyday life of his own people. He described them and their environment through a series of canvases devoted to landscapes with figures, and still life compositions of compelling invention and richness. Throughout there is no message other than his enormous appreciation for the beauty of life and his desire to share his own creative vision of it with others.
Added to these achievements was the artist's distinguished experimentation and accomplishment in the field of wall painting, or the pictorial mural. Through these he laid the ground work for an entire national school of mural painters. Both Martinez and his subsequent followers have had the greatest influence in this art form in the United States. Again, unlike many of his national confreres and students, he was happy in the act of creation without making use of any attendant means of propaganda. But then it must be remembered that he was deeply religious in the most profound and simple sense of that term.
Except for the chapels in New Mexico, which after all represent an archaic and foreign culture, the United States has had no tradition of ecclesiastical art, and almost none of the mural.*
There are, of course, a number of murals in this country, most of them painted during the 1930's, and a great many of them inspired by the movement which was then typified by "the modern Mexican Renaissance." Too, there are a number of famous works done by well-known Mexican artists. A great many of these have been sources of both inspiration as well as controversy. Unquestionably, each of these has regarded the tradition of the mural as it originated in the fresco schools of Italy, and has therefore been of tremendous value in our own contemporary artistic development.
One of the effects that always accompany the mural painting of Martinez is that of an all-over serenity. This quality is not only the result of his own personal thinking and temperament, but an almost profound intuition for the problems and even exigencies of filling space in relation to a given architectural structure. Perhaps the greatest achievement of this artist's career is to be found in a series of murals in place in the chapel of the cemetery at Santa Barbara. This chapel, dedicated in 1926, was designed by the late George Washington Smith. It is done after the mode of the Catalonian XVth Century period, which lingers between Romanesque and Gothic. The building itself is beautifully set on a wooded hill that overlooks the sea. The simple, intimate, yet somehow noble beauty of the building is a genuine tribute to the landscape. Inside the chapel this very beauty is further sustained by the Martinez murals which were presented to the chapel by Mrs. George Washington Smith and Mr. Henry Eichheim, as a memorial to George Washington Smith, and Ethel Roe Eichheim. Mr. Eichheim having been a distinguished musician and composer, the chapel becomes notable as marking the confluence of three distinguished creative artists.
Though the function of the chapel is non-denominational, I hardly know of a more convincingly reverential and truly devotional work of art in the mural usage than the Martinez frescoes placed there. Spiritually, these are akin in degree, if not in kind, to the best of the altar-pieces in the Southwest. I can think of no greater tribute.
The theme of the Resurrection dominates the interior and with the handling of the processionals of figures on either side of the chapel along with the garlands of Easter lilies used on the frieze, here is a singing and lyrical beauty not unremindful of Fra Angelico. This is a matter of spirit, rather than in any sense a physical treatment. There is a fine feeling of slowly rising tempo and gathering of cadence which resolves with the Christ whose uplifted hands dominate the space above the altar. This portion is topped by a dome finished with gold leaf. At the other end of the building and facing the Christ, is one of the most moving compositions of all. This depicts grieving humanity shown as a group of Mexican women with faces buried in hand. This depicting of the phenomenon of death and its attendant grief, then leads, via the moving procession on the side walls to the figure of the Risen Christ at the opposite end. The whole of the decoration is executed in secco, which is a form of wall or fresco painting, with the use of tempera. The color is simple, being mainly kept to black and white with a few flashes of blues, an occasional ochre and green complimented by reddish-brown. There is great strength in the structural drawing of the figures and the details scatter a rich pattern over all. However, the color is quietly luminous and seems to have been struck in terms of purity and light while the figures themselves are deeply moving in a way that defies any actual description.*I am thinking particularly of the great altar-piece in the modest chapel of San Jose de la Laguna, situated between Gallup and Albuquerque.
The Game of Circumstance
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"Anyone can observe that the duration for which we are exposed to impressions has no bearing on their fate in memory... It is not therefore, due to insufficient exposure time if no image appears on the plate of remembrance. More frequent, perhaps, are the cases where the half-light of habit denies the plate the necessary light for years, until one day from an alien source it flashes as if from burning magnesium power and now a snapshot transfixes the... image on the plate. (Walter Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle.")
Alfredo Ramos Martinez, painter and teacher, was both a victim and victor of time's inexplicable games with memory. Not only ignores and forgotten in Mexico after moving to Los Angeles, in 1929, he has also been overlooked for his contributions to the artistic milieu that shaped the aesthetic of the Southern California area. Although acclaimed and recognized by fellow artists such as Stanton McDonald-Wright and Rufino Tamayo, his role as a modernist innovator of form and style is just the beginning to be acknowledged. Now, forty-five years after his death, historical revisionism has fortuitously cast light on the "plate of remembrance" and his art surfaces as a bridge between two countries and as a legacy to both.
The neglect that Ramos Martinez' work has suffered reflects, to a large degree, the kinds of risks that twentieth century artists faced in confronting the circumstances of an era of political upheavals and sudden shifts in aesthetic trends. Schooled in Mexico, a painter in the Parisian post-Impressionist period, a founder of the Mexican School of painting, and an artist-émigré in the United States, Ramos Martinez would become a cultural conduit between two continents and three countries.
Returning to Mexico in 1910 after his years abroad, he transplanted the styles and ideas of European art into Mexican art. And although he never professed to be an ideologue nor a political artist, his work and his commitment to art responded stylistically and thematically to the social environment in which he worked. Later, in 1929 and until his death in 194, painting and painters in Southern California would be influenced by his strong graphic line and his fresco techniques.
The years in Paris are not well documented but two incidents afford insights into his life there. One is the prize won at the Salon d'Automne 1906; the other is his friendship with the great Modernist master, the poet Rubén Darío, with whom he traveled to Majorca in 1907. The prize speaks for itself; the friendship and the poem dedicated to him, to the intelligence of the young painter.
Ramos Martinez returned to Mexico in 1910 to a country in turmoil. The thirty-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz was under attack by the political reforms of Francisco T. Madero. In 1911, one month after Diaz' resignation under duress, the art students at the National Academy called a strike as a protest against "aesthetic dictatorship."
But because of the unstable political situation, it was not until 1913 that the demands for reform were partially answered by the founding of the first Open-Air school (Barbizon) in Santa Anita Ixtapalapa, conceived and founded by Alfredo Ramos Martinez who along with Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo) had begun introducing young Mexican painters to impressionism.
The first experimental school was short lived; Dr. Atl was named supervisor of the National Academy and Ramos Martinez resigned. Yet the initial group included David Alfaro Siqueiros, Francisco Diaz de León, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Matea Bolaños, and Fernando Leal. Seven years later, the original demands for administrative change at the Academy were finally met. The power to appoint the director was given to teachers and students and Alfredo Ramos Martinez was their choice. In the words of Rafael Vera de Córdoba who spoke for the group: "Ramos Martinez is a true 'original' we can become mature men, artists, teachers and patriots. To raise Mexican art to a higher level - that is our destiny."
Along with the directorship, Ramos Martinez revived the Open Air Schools. The Secretary of Education, José Vasconcelos set out to develop and promote Fine Arts throughout the country. In 1923 the mural program, one of the original ideas of the 1911 Strike, began, and by 1925 there were four Open Air Schools in operation. Muralists, Roberto Montenegro (Mexico's first muralist) and Diego Rivera recruited painters for their murals from the Open-Air School in Chimalistac, including those mentioned above.
Under Ramos Martinez, Impressionism was conceived as an opposing aesthetic to the rigid academic painting that has prevailed until then. But his aesthetic philosophy also incorporated nationalistic bent: "In order to create true art we must inevitably look to our own native values," he declared. And later on, when Plutarco Elías Calles assumed the presidency in 1925, and re-structured the Fine Arts Program, Calles gave stronger support to the Open-Air Schools because of their encouragement to "the artist talent of the Mexican race."
As a showcase for the government's cultural policy, exhibitions of work from the schools were held, first at the National Academy and then at the Palacio de Minera. In attendance at the opening were two French scholars, Pierre Janet, a psychologist and Emile Gley, a physiologist, both professors at the Collège de France. Their enthusiasm voiced by Janet, "The race of yours from Mexico, has he potential, in embryonic form, of the highest artistic talents," encouraged the government to exhibit the work in Los Angeles (in conjunction with the 1925 Pan American Exhibition) and in 1926, under Ramos Martinez' curatorship, in Paris, Madrid and Berlin.
In 1927, the concept of the schools was broadened to include "Peoples Painting Centers." Simultaneously, Ramos Martinez came under attack from those quarters opposed to the cultural policies of the Calles Administration. He found himself embroiled in a polemic, defending the very principles, which had provided the impetus and basis for the establishment of the Mexican School of Painting. But he was not alone; his defenders included the artists who had fought against academic rigidity including Diego Rivera, Roberto Montenegro and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
In 1929, in the midst of this debate, Alfredo Ramos Martinez who had married Maria de Sodi Romero the year before, left Mexico to seek medical help for their infant daughter. With his departure, the Open-Air Schools declined. And he began a new life, as a painter and muralist in Los Angeles, California.
Ramos Martinez brought with him an established reputation at a time in which artists in California were looking toward Mexico for aesthetic direction and inspiration. Orozco and Rivera were beginning mural projects in California and the Mexican muralist movement had already sparked the beginnings of the WPA muralist movement. Settling in Los Angeles, he was immediately befriended by the muralist Leo Katz, and his strong graphic style would eventually influence Maynard Dixon, Hugo Ballin, Fletcher Martin, and Millard Sheets. Throughout the remaining years of his life, he continued to explore the aesthetic of the School of Mexico as well as its themes and content.
If Mexican modernism "...is the product of the 1910 Revolution, which projected not only a utopian vision of the future, also a return to Mexico's roots," as Hans Haufe sates, Ramos Martinez stands among the painter who initiated that movement. Certainly his belief in art as the source of human and cultural salvation continues to manifest itself even after his departure from Mexico. But the distance between Los Angeles and Mexico as well as the shits in political and aesthetic constructs allowed other stars to shine more brightly. Still, time is ultimately kind to greatness. It is now the moment to recognize Alfredo Ramos Martinez' contribution to the history of Mexican art.In a review published in Rob Wagner's Script, April 14, 1945, Stanton MacDonald-Wright refers to Ramos Martinez as "...the best of the Mexicans to exhibit consistently over here..." Tamayo referred to him as "one of the neglected figures of Mexican Muralism." (George Raphael Small, Alfredo Ramos Martinez: His Life and Art (Westlake Villag: F & J Publishing Corp., 1975), page 61.
In an article published in Mexico upon Ramos Martinez' death in 1946, Guillermo Jimenez discusses the relationship and friendship between Dario and Ramos Martinez. Todo, November 21, 1946.
The information on the Open-Air Schools and the political climate that surrounded the movement is taken from Sylvia Pandolfi's article, "The Mexican Open-Air Painting Schools Movement (1913-1935), pages 123-127, in Images of Mexico: The Contributions of Mexico to 20th Century Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Ed. Erika Billeter, 1988.
In the research I conducted this year as a Smithsonian Senior Post-doctoral Fellow at the Archives of American Art, I began exploring the relationship if the "Mexican Presence" to the Southern California cultural scene in the Thirties. One of the most important influences is Alfredo Ramos Martinez. Sourced on him are found in three major archives; the Ferdinand Perret History of California Art, 1857-1950, and the Ferdinand Perret Notebooks on California Artists, and the Earl Stendahl Gallery Archive. I would like to thank the staff at the West Coast Area Center for their constant support throughout the fellowship.
Hans Haufe, "Muralism, Self Made Art" in Images of Mexico, pages 91-103
