Beauty from a tormented life

His studios were California mental wards, his canvas bits of paper assembled from trash bins and his pigments melted crayons.

Self-taught draftsman Martin Ramirez dealt with schizophrenia and estrangement from his family in Mexico with an outpouring of hypnotic drawings and collages.

So popular and critically acclaimed are Ramirez’s 96 works on display at the American Folk Art Museum that the museum announced a two-week extension of the three-month retrospective until May 13 and added another museum to the show’s itinerary.

The retrospective, curated by Brooke Anderson, is the first to interpret Ramirez’s work in the context of his difficult life and times.

“Visitor attendance for this exhibition is the highest in the museum’s history,” said public relations director Susan Flamm. “On weekends we’re getting 1,000 visitors a day, which is a lot for a small museum. The catalog has gone into a second printing.”

The added stop is the San Jose Museum of Art June 9 through Sept. 9. Then the show travels to the Milwaukee Art Museum Oct. 6 through Jan. 7.

The show’s loans from private collections and museums in the United States, Mexico and Europe represent about a third of Ramirez’s 300 surviving works.

These compositions were largely viewed as curiosities from a mute “schizophrenic artist” at a few public showings before his death in 1963 at age 68.

Now his works command tens of thousands of dollars or more on the art market, Flamm said.

Ramirez composed in a diverse figurative style with detailed, symmetrical motifs that fused his recollections of growing up in Mexico’s rural Jalisco state, his migrant worker years in California and confinement after his mental breakdown.

Inventive draftsmanship and extraordinary manipulations of spatial elements characterize his drawings and collages, many in the 24-inch-by-36-inch range, some much larger.

Stagelike settings of precise vertical and horizontal lines or curving whorls resembling terraced mounds often frame Ramirez’s subjects: cowboys with pistols astride steeds; serpentine trains or lines of vehicles flowing toward dark tunnels; Madonnas with spiked headdresses and long gowns.

He was born in 1895 in rural Jalisco, married a local young woman at age 23, with whom he had three daughters and a son. Ramirez bought a small piece of land on credit in 1923, but with economic troubles and political unrest in the region, he decided to go to the United States for better earnings.

He worked on the railroads and in mines in Northern California from 1925 to 1930, then suffered a mental breakdown in early 1931. Committed to Stockton State hospital, he was initially diagnosed with manic depression. After two years of treatment, the diagnosis was changed to dementia praecox, catatonic form.

Tarmio Pasto, a professor of psychology and art at Sacramento State College, met Ramirez in 1948 at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, Calif., recognized his talent and helped obtain art supplies.

Before that assistance, Ramirez manufactured his own materials.

Pasto later arranged Ramirez’s first exhibits in Northern California in the 1950s. He preserved the works and helped bring them into the art market after the artist’s death.