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Lot Essay
We are grateful to the estate of the artist and the Fundación Ricardo Martínez for their assistance confirming the authenticity of this work.
We are grateful to Dr. Mark Ruben for his assistance cataloguing this work.
Painting is done in silence. It is not popular art; rather, it is art of intimacy, an art of recluses. One has to carry out a deep self-reflection.
Ricardo Martínez[1]
Indeed, Mexican artist Ricardo Martínez de Hoyos (1918-2009) has been described as a recluse, not for an absence of companionship during his long career (his friendships included an impressive list of notable writers such as Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Marquez, and Alí Chumacero, as well as artists José Luis Cuevas and Vicente Rojo, among others), but rather, for his hermetic work ethic; surrounded by a large family from birth—he was one of sixteen siblings and had four children of his own with his love Zarina Lacy—the self-taught painter dedicated himself fully to his studio practice. Detailing his routine, he would “awake early, read the papers while he breakfasted, walk in the garden or in Viveros de Coyoacán park, speak on the telephone for hours with different friends, eat at exactly 1:30 pm, and paint until the sun set. Religiously, he would drink a mug of warm milk snacking on something light and would read or watch television before going to bed, usually early. He was constant in his schedule and frugal in habit,” recounts his daughter.[2] This consistency is reflected in Martínez’ oeuvre. Between 1957 until his death in 2009, he developed his mature, signature painting style: a monumental figuration where massive, primordial beings, singly or in pairs, tenderly commune through touch, gaze, and the merging of their bodies with the surrounding “Rothko-esque” atmosphere, a nebulous atemporal space.[3]
Martínez’ artistic search during the 1940s and early 1950s was aligned with the contracorriente (Countercurrent) interests, sympathetic with the stylistic and thematic approaches of his contemporaries Julio Castellanos, Juan Soriano, and Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, who applied metaphysical and Picassian lessons to local, indigenous subject-matter.[4] In 1943, artist Federico Cantú took just such a painting, El ángel by his friend Martínez, to Inés Amor, director of Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM); within three days Amor had sold for 600 pesos Martínez’s painting of a cluster of barefoot schoolboys lunging at a flying figure far from reach.[5] “I almost fainted as it was a fortune,” recalled Martínez.[6] He presented solo exhibitions annually or biennially at GAM beginning in 1944. An internationally established artist by mid-century as evidenced by his participation in the Venice Biennale of 1958 and an individual exhibition in the São Paulo Biennale of 1963, Martínez secured representation in New York City at Karl Lund’s The Contemporaries Art Gallery located on Madison Avenue where he presented solo exhibitions from 1958-64. From the 1970s on he chose self-representation, successfully managing all aspects of his career from his working studio at his home on Calle Etna 32 in Colonia Alpes.
Martínez painted Elotes in 1957, the year that he transitioned from what art historian Teresa del Conde described as his “first phase…a very gratifying array of ‘Mexicanist’ motives…generally small-format and of an unsurpassable quality,”[7] into the focused vision that he would refine over more than half a century. Elotes and its subsequent sister-piece Pareja con elote (also known as “Offering to Life”) of 1958, complete that body of costumbrista paintings produced between 1954 and 1958 that portray the everyday, contemporary life of the Indian peasant set against a field of color; smoking cigarettes, reading a letter or newspaper, playing the guitar, carrying hand-woven baskets, gardening, and holding local identifiers—luscious regional fruits, hand-made cheeses, and crops of the land such as the roasted maíz in Elotes. Martínez’s subjects have now become sculptural, heavy in body and limbs. Filling the canvas frame are thick figures clothed in the peasant’s white cotton garments and wearing distinctive woven sombreros or rebozos (woven shawls). The artist appears to conjure inert mass from diffusive light as he merges figure and ground. This fortunate stylistic shift is clearly indebted to Martínez’ close study of the pre-Columbian statuary that he acquired slowly to form a significant collection, as well as the blocky sculptural approach of mentors, brother Oliverio Martínez (1901-1938) and the latter’s then-assistant, Francisco Zuñiga.
Elotes indicates the direction of Martínez’ artistic trajectory. From this point on, Martínez will build a body of art consistent in expression and visual language. The scale of his paintings will increase to 4 x 5 feet and larger. He will move away from costumbrismo to achieve a universalism in his painting akin to that developed by the “Fourth Great,” Rufino Tamayo. Divesting his subjects of any outward sign of indigenous identity beyond the physical form, he will abandon the sombrero, huarache, sarape, rebozo, and white cotton garments in favor exclusively of a nude corpulence; Martínez will give birth to a slumbering, yet awakening “race of giants,” their noble features and chiseled “broad faces”[8] often projected in silhouette on his large canvases. Through his powerful imagery developed over the course of a lifetime, Martínez will achieve, as poet Ruben Bonifaz Nuño pointed out in 1965, the “denial of man’s mortality and a representation of him as immortal,”[9] everlasting, and timeless.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
We are grateful to Dr. Mark Ruben for his assistance cataloguing this work.
Painting is done in silence. It is not popular art; rather, it is art of intimacy, an art of recluses. One has to carry out a deep self-reflection.
Ricardo Martínez[1]
Indeed, Mexican artist Ricardo Martínez de Hoyos (1918-2009) has been described as a recluse, not for an absence of companionship during his long career (his friendships included an impressive list of notable writers such as Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Marquez, and Alí Chumacero, as well as artists José Luis Cuevas and Vicente Rojo, among others), but rather, for his hermetic work ethic; surrounded by a large family from birth—he was one of sixteen siblings and had four children of his own with his love Zarina Lacy—the self-taught painter dedicated himself fully to his studio practice. Detailing his routine, he would “awake early, read the papers while he breakfasted, walk in the garden or in Viveros de Coyoacán park, speak on the telephone for hours with different friends, eat at exactly 1:30 pm, and paint until the sun set. Religiously, he would drink a mug of warm milk snacking on something light and would read or watch television before going to bed, usually early. He was constant in his schedule and frugal in habit,” recounts his daughter.[2] This consistency is reflected in Martínez’ oeuvre. Between 1957 until his death in 2009, he developed his mature, signature painting style: a monumental figuration where massive, primordial beings, singly or in pairs, tenderly commune through touch, gaze, and the merging of their bodies with the surrounding “Rothko-esque” atmosphere, a nebulous atemporal space.[3]
Martínez’ artistic search during the 1940s and early 1950s was aligned with the contracorriente (Countercurrent) interests, sympathetic with the stylistic and thematic approaches of his contemporaries Julio Castellanos, Juan Soriano, and Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, who applied metaphysical and Picassian lessons to local, indigenous subject-matter.[4] In 1943, artist Federico Cantú took just such a painting, El ángel by his friend Martínez, to Inés Amor, director of Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM); within three days Amor had sold for 600 pesos Martínez’s painting of a cluster of barefoot schoolboys lunging at a flying figure far from reach.[5] “I almost fainted as it was a fortune,” recalled Martínez.[6] He presented solo exhibitions annually or biennially at GAM beginning in 1944. An internationally established artist by mid-century as evidenced by his participation in the Venice Biennale of 1958 and an individual exhibition in the São Paulo Biennale of 1963, Martínez secured representation in New York City at Karl Lund’s The Contemporaries Art Gallery located on Madison Avenue where he presented solo exhibitions from 1958-64. From the 1970s on he chose self-representation, successfully managing all aspects of his career from his working studio at his home on Calle Etna 32 in Colonia Alpes.
Martínez painted Elotes in 1957, the year that he transitioned from what art historian Teresa del Conde described as his “first phase…a very gratifying array of ‘Mexicanist’ motives…generally small-format and of an unsurpassable quality,”[7] into the focused vision that he would refine over more than half a century. Elotes and its subsequent sister-piece Pareja con elote (also known as “Offering to Life”) of 1958, complete that body of costumbrista paintings produced between 1954 and 1958 that portray the everyday, contemporary life of the Indian peasant set against a field of color; smoking cigarettes, reading a letter or newspaper, playing the guitar, carrying hand-woven baskets, gardening, and holding local identifiers—luscious regional fruits, hand-made cheeses, and crops of the land such as the roasted maíz in Elotes. Martínez’s subjects have now become sculptural, heavy in body and limbs. Filling the canvas frame are thick figures clothed in the peasant’s white cotton garments and wearing distinctive woven sombreros or rebozos (woven shawls). The artist appears to conjure inert mass from diffusive light as he merges figure and ground. This fortunate stylistic shift is clearly indebted to Martínez’ close study of the pre-Columbian statuary that he acquired slowly to form a significant collection, as well as the blocky sculptural approach of mentors, brother Oliverio Martínez (1901-1938) and the latter’s then-assistant, Francisco Zuñiga.
Elotes indicates the direction of Martínez’ artistic trajectory. From this point on, Martínez will build a body of art consistent in expression and visual language. The scale of his paintings will increase to 4 x 5 feet and larger. He will move away from costumbrismo to achieve a universalism in his painting akin to that developed by the “Fourth Great,” Rufino Tamayo. Divesting his subjects of any outward sign of indigenous identity beyond the physical form, he will abandon the sombrero, huarache, sarape, rebozo, and white cotton garments in favor exclusively of a nude corpulence; Martínez will give birth to a slumbering, yet awakening “race of giants,” their noble features and chiseled “broad faces”[8] often projected in silhouette on his large canvases. Through his powerful imagery developed over the course of a lifetime, Martínez will achieve, as poet Ruben Bonifaz Nuño pointed out in 1965, the “denial of man’s mortality and a representation of him as immortal,”[9] everlasting, and timeless.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio