Alfredo Ramos Martínez

AVAILABLE WORK

BIOGRAPHY

Alfredo Ramos Martínez was born in 1871 in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. He was a painter, muralist, and educator, widely regarded as the “Father of Mexican modernism.”

At the age of fourteen, one of the artist's drawings, was submitted to an exhibition in San Antonio, Texas, and won first prize. As a result, the young artist received a scholarship to study at Mexico's most prestigious art school, the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

Martínez spent eight years at the university and spent much of his time drawing and painting with watercolor. However, he found the teaching methods at the Academy to be repressive, and the young artist yearned to move to Paris where an exciting movement was emerging.

In a stroke of luck, American philanthropist Phoebe Hearst, attended a dinner in Mexico City for the Mexican president, Porfirio Díaz. The dinner featured tablecloths designed and painted by Ramos Martínez. Hearst was so impressed with the decoration that she requested to meet the artist and see more examples of his work. After their meeting, she decided to provide financial support for the artist to move to Paris.

Ramos Martínez's arrived in Paris in 1897. While in Paris he had the chance to view the of artists such as Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon firsthand, he attended many galleries and salons and befriended the modernist poet Rubén Darío. The two of them later traveled to Belgium and the Netherlands to see the work of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, which influenced Ramos Martínez in his work moving forward.

It was in Brittany that Ramos Martínez began to paint and draw on newspapers, a medium he also used during his years in California. When he discovered he had run out of drawing paper, he asked the innkeeper at the place he was staying for a weekend if they had any suitable paper for drawing. The gentleman offered plenty of discarded newspapers.

In 1905, Ramos Martínez began participating in the annual Salon d'Automne in Paris, perhaps the most important of all salons at that time. Within a year of his first exhibition there, his painting "Le Printemps" received the gold medal. However, after this great recognition, Hearst decided to discontinue her monthly support, and Ramos Martínez began the struggle to make a living as an artist. Ramos Martínez presented his work in various galleries in Paris. One of the prominent art critics of the time, Camille Mauclair, wrote that Ramos Martínez's work was in the same class as the finest Impressionist landscapes exhibited in Paris. While sales of his artwork were ongoing, and Ramos Martínez had achieved a certain degree of comfort as a "Parisian," in 1909, he felt a strong desire to return to Mexico.

In 1910, Alfredo Ramos Martínez returned to Mexico during a period of national crisis. The Mexican Revolution was gaining momentum, and President Porfirio Díaz's 30-year rule was on the verge of collapse due to the pressure from the political reforms of Francisco I. Madero. A year after the president's resignation in 1911, art students from the National Academy called for a strike to protest the "aesthetic dictatorship" of the Academy. They demanded the establishment of a "Free Academy" and proposed Ramos Martínez as its director. Recognized as a distinguished former student, a successful European artist, and a supporter of the students' cause, Ramos Martínez became the first assistant director and, in 1913, the director of the Academy.

As the director, he was able to open the first of his Open-Air Painting Schools. With the examples of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in mind and fueled by his belief in the primacy of the artist's personal vision, Ramos Martínez's Open-Air Schools redefined the nature of art instruction in Mexico.

The first school was established in the Santa Anita Iztapalapa district of Mexico City with an initial class of 10 students, including David Alfaro Siqueiros and Federico Cantú, who would later become successful artists in their own right. By 1914, Ramos Martínez left his position as Director of the Academy but opened another Open-Air School in Coyoacán. That same year, his students' work was featured in the "Exhibition of Works from Public and Art Schools" at the Pavilion of Spain and received an extremely favorable response.

In 1928, Ramos Martínez married María de Sodi Romero from Oaxaca. Their daughter, Maria, was born a year later, suffering from a paralyzing bone disease. Ramos Martínez resigned as the director of the Academy and sought treatment for his daughter's condition. The family traveled to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and eventually settled in Los Angeles.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1929, William Alanson Bryan, the Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Exposition Park, offered Ramos Martínez an exhibition. Several subsequent exhibitions followed, with Martínez establishing a strong relationship with the Hollywood community. The art director and interior decorator for Warner Brothers acquired a series of the artist's works and promoted them to his clients. Prominent film directors Ernst Lubitsch and Alfred Hitchcock, costume designer Edith Head, screenwriter Jo Swerling, and actors Charles Laughton, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, and Beulah Bondi, among others, collected his work.

Ramos Martínez also exhibited with great success in San Diego at the Fine Arts Gallery in Balboa Park and in San Francisco at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was there that the famous Bay Area patron, Albert M. Bender, first saw Ramos Martínez's work. Bender became a lifelong friend of the artist and acquired numerous works for his personal collection. Additionally, he purchased and donated Ramos Martínez's works to various San Francisco institutions, including the Legion of Honor, San Francisco Museum of Art, California Historical Society, and Mills College.

In addition to his mastery of all conventional media, including drawing, printmaking, watercolor, and easel painting, Ramos Martínez was an extremely skilled muralist who excelled in the technically challenging art of traditional fresco painting. Although several of his murals were destroyed, including those at the Chapman Park Hotel in Los Angeles (next to the famous Brown Derby restaurant) and the Normal School for Teachers (Escuela Normal) in Mexico City, several important examples have survived. These include the Cemetery Chapel of Santa Barbara (1934); The Avenida Café, Coronado, California (1938) (later restored and moved to the Coronado Public Library); and the unfinished fresco project, The Flower Vendors in the Margaret Fowler Garden at Scripps College, Claremont, California (1945). The Scripps mural was commissioned by the College at the suggestion of Millard Sheets, the highly regarded California artist and longtime admirer of Ramos Martínez. Another fresco, one of Ramos Martínez's most significant works, La Guelaguetza, named after the ancient Oaxacan celebration of Earth's abundance, was commissioned in 1933 by screenwriter Jo Swerling for his Beverly Hills home. After being in obscurity for many years, it was rescued before the demolition of the residence in 1990.

Alfredo Ramos Martínez unexpectedly passed away at the age of 73 on November 8, 1946, in Los Angeles. He was buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

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