Alfredo Ramos Martínez

Biografía

Widely considered to be the father of Mexican modern art, Alfredo Ramos Martínez is known for depictions of Mexican and Mexican-American people that reveal the influence of both French Post-Impressionism and his country’s Pre-Columbian heritage. In 2007, his painting Flowers of Mexico (1938) sold for a record $4.1 million at Christie’s. As a teenager, Ramos Martínez won a scholarship to the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. He disliked the school’s rigidity and Eurocentrism however, preferring instead to sketch scenes of everyday life outside the classroom. After studying in Paris, he returned to Mexico in 1910 on the eve of national revolution to found the first of several open-air art schools inspired by the Impressionist practice of plein air painting. David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo were among his students. Ramos Martínez moved to Los Angeles in 1930 and soon after abandoned oil painting altogether, instead creating portraits of fruit vendors and Indigenous women in tempera on newsprint and painting murals commissioned by patrons and institutions in L.A. and across the U.S.