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Lot Essay
Louis Stern has confirmed the authenticity of this work. It will be included in the catalogue raisonné of paintings, to be published by the Alfredo Ramos Martínez Research Project.
The most obscure, the most retiring, the most self-effacing, and yet the most important man in the Mexican Renaissance is Alfredo Ramos Martínez.
–Brooke Waring, Hollywood movie scenic painter, 1935.1
Alfredo Ramos Martínez spent his childhood surrounded by the natural beauty of his grandfather’s vast terrain, the Hacienda Larraldeña in Sabinas Hidalgo, north of Monterrey in the border state of Nuevo León.2 Born here in 1871, as a boy he would have played under the gnarled, majestic sabinas (cypress trees) and swum during hot summers in the Ojo de Agua natural springs or at the Charco del Lobo water hole among purple sage and Mexican olive trees with the prominent silhouette of the area’s landmark, the Pico mountain, visible in the distance. It was the beginning of the long Porfirian dictatorship that ended in the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, an era during which the economic and social differences between the privileged hacendado (landowner) and the Indian peon were extreme, the latter’s subjugation and assimilation a goal of the ruling elite’s positivist stance with a push for industrial progress and a proclaimed love of all things French. Ramos Martínez’s family were merchants by trade. Growing up on the hacienda he would have witnessed the widening class and racial divide between peasant and landowner as the central government privatized Indian communal ejidos to sell off to foreign mining and railroad developers.
The talented young artist would leave this natural oasis behind when he won a drawing competition, the prize a scholarship to study at the Academia de San Carlos in the country’s historic capital.3 The institution’s conservative pedagogy based in mimesis, the study of plaster reproductions of Greek and Roman classical sculpture, and heavily costumed models, produced grand history paintings such as Leandro Izaguirre’s monumental Torture of Cuauhtémoc of 1893, indebted to Jacques Louis David’s French neoclassicism. And while Ramos Martínez excelled at the Academy winning competitive awards, he often skipped classes compelled to escape the colonial building to draw outdoors, directly from nature; he mastered the then-uncommon mediums of pastel and watercolor through close observation of flowers and indigenous laborers in the outlying neighborhoods of Coyoacán, where his family lived, Chimalistac, and Churubusco.4
The artist’s floral painting of tablecloths and/or menus for a dinner party President Porfirio Diaz threw in honor of visitor Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother to the famous media magnate, William Randolph Hearst, caught the philanthropist’s attention; she then sponsored Ramos Martínez’ voyage to Europe gifting him a monthly stipend that ended six years later in 1906 when he won the first prize at the Paris Salon d’Automne for Le Printemps, a large Botticelli-inspired canvas of young fête galante maidens bearing floral bouquets.5 His contemporaneous pastel drawings on newspaper of pious Breton devotees in northwest France echoed Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin in subject, unnaturalistic color, and the play between figure and ground; this approach pointed to the artist’s future mature indigenismo that he would develop in the 1930s in southern California through fresco murals, pastels, and oils such as La India.
An accomplished artist after spending a decade in Europe, with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 Ramos Martínez returned home to propel the artistic revolution; he, in fact, initiated Mexican modernism as the Academy’s newly appointed director of painting by establishing the first Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre (EPAL, Open Air Painting School) in Santa Anita Ixtapalapa. There in a rented house on the edges of the chinampas (floating gardens) disadvantaged students created a national art that was “free, fresh, and avant-garde contrasting with what was produced in the San Carlos studios.”6 While nicknamed “Barbizon” after the mid-19th Century French artist pioneers who painted from nature in the Forest of Fontainebleau south of Paris using the village of Barbizon as their base-camp, the lush gardens and local peasants surrounding Santa Anita likely reminded Ramos Martínez of his childhood home, Hacienda Larraldeña. Such students as Fernando Leal and Ramón Cano Manilla attending additional EPAL schools established under Ramos Martínez’s direction in the 1920s would produce vanguard, anti-academic, and intuitive painting. Typical of the latter were sculptural, frontal, native figures pressed against shallow backdrops of foliage under dappled, Impressionist lighting; to detail native dress and fruit, they used a bright color palette drawn from indigenous, arte popular ceramics and textiles. Painted in this manner, Ramos Martínez’s Indian Couple with Watermelon of 1914 foretold of his later California production to which La India belongs.
Stylistically eclectic in personal work and portrait commissions that he produced between 1910 and 1930, Ramos Martínez leaned on lessons learned from the dark Spanish Symbolist Ignacio Zuloaga and the luminosity and loose brushwork of Joaquín Sorolla. He further studied Goya’s portraiture from postures to delicately pointed feet, while absorbing Gauguin’s primitivizing, “othering” aesthetic; even so, the common thread throughout his figurative work was his persistent exploration of female typologies such as the femme fatale, the china poblana, Eve, la Malinche, the Virgin Mary, and La India.7
Newly married, with an infant who needed medical attention, and a Hollywood market eager to acquire the artist’s romantic view of a feminine, native and floral Mexico, Ramos Martínez moved his wife and daughter permanently to Los Angeles in 1929. The artist soon found contract work as a set designer for various movie studios;8 it was at Paramount Pictures that he likely came into contact with art director Bill (Wiard Boppo) Inhen, who, remarkably, had assisted David Alfaro Siqueiros in painting his infamous mural America Trópical of 1932 on Olvera Street,9 as well as Edith Head, who started at Paramount as a sketch artist in 1923 working her way up to chief designer by 1938. Bill and Edith would marry in 1940 and live in her California “hacienda style” adobe farmhouse in Beverly Hills that she purchased in 1933 and named Casa Ladera.10
For nearly half a century, Ramos Martínez’s imposing La India would hang as the centerpiece of Casa Ladera’s ample patio, above rustic wicker furniture from Portugal, next to a wall displaying an impressive collection of Mexican ceramic ollas (cookware).11 When, in 1978 Head asked photographer Bill Childers to capture her seated before the painting, she, like La India was a timeless, stoic icon; as Childers described her, the fashionista was in a word, “formidable.”12 Her severe “look” of round glasses, straight bangs, and “schoolmarm attire,” so distinct as to give life to Edna Mode, Disney/Pixar’s Incredibles’ seamstress of superhero costumes, constructed a public persona for this author of The Dress Doctor and thirty-time nominee/eight-time Oscar winner, while at her Casa Ladera home she dressed herself in colorful Mexican garments and jewelry.13
The self-made fashion diva must have identified with the monumental, golden-hued La India, her noble, uncompromising visage filling the canvas; Head also shared much in common with La India’s painter Ramos Martínez, from her petite stature, strong work ethic, resourcefulness, high accomplishments, to her grand ambition. The San Bernardino-native, who mythologized her origins by claiming at times to have been born and raised in Mexico, embraced difference for herself while fashioning on-screen ideals; Ramos Martínez, displaced from his native Mexico late in life, now a committed proponent of indigenismo on canvas and fresco, fed Hollywood’s vision of a Mexican paradise as he fashioned, in works such as La India, an enduring image of Deep Mexico.14
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
The most obscure, the most retiring, the most self-effacing, and yet the most important man in the Mexican Renaissance is Alfredo Ramos Martínez.
–Brooke Waring, Hollywood movie scenic painter, 1935.1
Alfredo Ramos Martínez spent his childhood surrounded by the natural beauty of his grandfather’s vast terrain, the Hacienda Larraldeña in Sabinas Hidalgo, north of Monterrey in the border state of Nuevo León.2 Born here in 1871, as a boy he would have played under the gnarled, majestic sabinas (cypress trees) and swum during hot summers in the Ojo de Agua natural springs or at the Charco del Lobo water hole among purple sage and Mexican olive trees with the prominent silhouette of the area’s landmark, the Pico mountain, visible in the distance. It was the beginning of the long Porfirian dictatorship that ended in the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, an era during which the economic and social differences between the privileged hacendado (landowner) and the Indian peon were extreme, the latter’s subjugation and assimilation a goal of the ruling elite’s positivist stance with a push for industrial progress and a proclaimed love of all things French. Ramos Martínez’s family were merchants by trade. Growing up on the hacienda he would have witnessed the widening class and racial divide between peasant and landowner as the central government privatized Indian communal ejidos to sell off to foreign mining and railroad developers.
The talented young artist would leave this natural oasis behind when he won a drawing competition, the prize a scholarship to study at the Academia de San Carlos in the country’s historic capital.3 The institution’s conservative pedagogy based in mimesis, the study of plaster reproductions of Greek and Roman classical sculpture, and heavily costumed models, produced grand history paintings such as Leandro Izaguirre’s monumental Torture of Cuauhtémoc of 1893, indebted to Jacques Louis David’s French neoclassicism. And while Ramos Martínez excelled at the Academy winning competitive awards, he often skipped classes compelled to escape the colonial building to draw outdoors, directly from nature; he mastered the then-uncommon mediums of pastel and watercolor through close observation of flowers and indigenous laborers in the outlying neighborhoods of Coyoacán, where his family lived, Chimalistac, and Churubusco.4
The artist’s floral painting of tablecloths and/or menus for a dinner party President Porfirio Diaz threw in honor of visitor Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother to the famous media magnate, William Randolph Hearst, caught the philanthropist’s attention; she then sponsored Ramos Martínez’ voyage to Europe gifting him a monthly stipend that ended six years later in 1906 when he won the first prize at the Paris Salon d’Automne for Le Printemps, a large Botticelli-inspired canvas of young fête galante maidens bearing floral bouquets.5 His contemporaneous pastel drawings on newspaper of pious Breton devotees in northwest France echoed Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin in subject, unnaturalistic color, and the play between figure and ground; this approach pointed to the artist’s future mature indigenismo that he would develop in the 1930s in southern California through fresco murals, pastels, and oils such as La India.
An accomplished artist after spending a decade in Europe, with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 Ramos Martínez returned home to propel the artistic revolution; he, in fact, initiated Mexican modernism as the Academy’s newly appointed director of painting by establishing the first Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre (EPAL, Open Air Painting School) in Santa Anita Ixtapalapa. There in a rented house on the edges of the chinampas (floating gardens) disadvantaged students created a national art that was “free, fresh, and avant-garde contrasting with what was produced in the San Carlos studios.”6 While nicknamed “Barbizon” after the mid-19th Century French artist pioneers who painted from nature in the Forest of Fontainebleau south of Paris using the village of Barbizon as their base-camp, the lush gardens and local peasants surrounding Santa Anita likely reminded Ramos Martínez of his childhood home, Hacienda Larraldeña. Such students as Fernando Leal and Ramón Cano Manilla attending additional EPAL schools established under Ramos Martínez’s direction in the 1920s would produce vanguard, anti-academic, and intuitive painting. Typical of the latter were sculptural, frontal, native figures pressed against shallow backdrops of foliage under dappled, Impressionist lighting; to detail native dress and fruit, they used a bright color palette drawn from indigenous, arte popular ceramics and textiles. Painted in this manner, Ramos Martínez’s Indian Couple with Watermelon of 1914 foretold of his later California production to which La India belongs.
Stylistically eclectic in personal work and portrait commissions that he produced between 1910 and 1930, Ramos Martínez leaned on lessons learned from the dark Spanish Symbolist Ignacio Zuloaga and the luminosity and loose brushwork of Joaquín Sorolla. He further studied Goya’s portraiture from postures to delicately pointed feet, while absorbing Gauguin’s primitivizing, “othering” aesthetic; even so, the common thread throughout his figurative work was his persistent exploration of female typologies such as the femme fatale, the china poblana, Eve, la Malinche, the Virgin Mary, and La India.7
Newly married, with an infant who needed medical attention, and a Hollywood market eager to acquire the artist’s romantic view of a feminine, native and floral Mexico, Ramos Martínez moved his wife and daughter permanently to Los Angeles in 1929. The artist soon found contract work as a set designer for various movie studios;8 it was at Paramount Pictures that he likely came into contact with art director Bill (Wiard Boppo) Inhen, who, remarkably, had assisted David Alfaro Siqueiros in painting his infamous mural America Trópical of 1932 on Olvera Street,9 as well as Edith Head, who started at Paramount as a sketch artist in 1923 working her way up to chief designer by 1938. Bill and Edith would marry in 1940 and live in her California “hacienda style” adobe farmhouse in Beverly Hills that she purchased in 1933 and named Casa Ladera.10
For nearly half a century, Ramos Martínez’s imposing La India would hang as the centerpiece of Casa Ladera’s ample patio, above rustic wicker furniture from Portugal, next to a wall displaying an impressive collection of Mexican ceramic ollas (cookware).11 When, in 1978 Head asked photographer Bill Childers to capture her seated before the painting, she, like La India was a timeless, stoic icon; as Childers described her, the fashionista was in a word, “formidable.”12 Her severe “look” of round glasses, straight bangs, and “schoolmarm attire,” so distinct as to give life to Edna Mode, Disney/Pixar’s Incredibles’ seamstress of superhero costumes, constructed a public persona for this author of The Dress Doctor and thirty-time nominee/eight-time Oscar winner, while at her Casa Ladera home she dressed herself in colorful Mexican garments and jewelry.13
The self-made fashion diva must have identified with the monumental, golden-hued La India, her noble, uncompromising visage filling the canvas; Head also shared much in common with La India’s painter Ramos Martínez, from her petite stature, strong work ethic, resourcefulness, high accomplishments, to her grand ambition. The San Bernardino-native, who mythologized her origins by claiming at times to have been born and raised in Mexico, embraced difference for herself while fashioning on-screen ideals; Ramos Martínez, displaced from his native Mexico late in life, now a committed proponent of indigenismo on canvas and fresco, fed Hollywood’s vision of a Mexican paradise as he fashioned, in works such as La India, an enduring image of Deep Mexico.14
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio