Louis Stern Fine Arts at Art Basel Miami Beach
December 2 – 4, 2021
Survey Sector, Booth S06
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present a selection of works by Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871–1946) which highlight the artist’s reflections on his native Mexico during years spent between there and California. A pivotal figure in the development of Mexican Modernist art, Ramos Martínez was an influential cultural interlocutor between Mexico and the United States. Executed with clear compassion and reverence, these works celebrate the Mexican culture and people with the artist’s sensitive portrayals of daily life, struggle, and family.
The works focus on prevailing themes of the Mexican Renaissance, with particular interest in indigenismo, the recognition and elevation of Mexico’s indigenous identity. Tender scenes of family life and graceful flower and fruit vendors accompany more serious explorations of the costs of the Revolution, embodied in an image of men hung by ropes, bound and tortured. An iconic illustration of La Malinche, the controversial Nahua woman who acted as interpreter, advisor, and consort to Hernán Cortés, confronts the viewer with the complicated history of modern Mexico as a product of brutal conquest and the intermingling of Indigenous and Spanish heritage.
Ramos Martínez was a celebrated muralist, having been commissioned to execute numerous murals throughout the United States and Mexico including the celebrity homes of Jo Swerling, Edith Head and Beulah Bondi, the Chapel of the Santa Barbara Cemetery, and the Escuela Normal in Mexico City. A large, colorful study of flower vendors appears to be a preparatory drawing for a tile mosaic installed at Scripps College in Claremont, California, where the artist’s final mural series (left unfinished due to his death) is also executed. The mosaic was purportedly a collaboration between Ramos Martínez and Millard Sheets, the renowned painter, mosaic artist, and then-head of the Scripps College art department.
While Ramos Martínez is celebrated as a painter and muralist, some of his most iconic works were created on paper. He was said to have always carried a Conté crayon in his pocket, frequently drawing on newsprint from both English and Spanish language newspapers. The use of this material may have been motivated largely by its abundance, a habit reportedly having begun when the artist ran out of drawing paper on a visit to Brittany. The artist’s tendency to pull pages from the classified ad sections in particular, however, suggests a subtextual empathy and respect for the worker’s struggle.
A prolific painter and muralist and an innovative teacher, considered by many to be the founding father of Modern Mexican Art, Ramos Martínez has been a victim of circumstance. At a time when the Mexican Muralist movement gained great momentum with such recognizable names as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, Ramos Martínez was sidelined – possibly due to his apolitical nature during a highly political era. His legacy lives on, however, and his work is now gaining the recognition it deserves. As Hans Haufe states: "If Mexican modernism is the product of the 1910 Revolution, which projected not only a utopian vision of the future, but also a return to Mexico's roots, Ramos Martínez stands among the painters that initiated that movement."
Work by Alfredo Ramos Martínez has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Dallas Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico; and Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City, among many others. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; Phoenix Art Museum; San Diego Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.