A work by Martín Ramírez. (Courtesy Ricco/Maresca)

“It’s a good artist whose work grabs our attention or entertains us,” the renowned American graphic designer Milton Glaser once told me. “It’s a great artist whose work changes the way we see.” The latter part of that observation certainly describes the effect of any encounter with the drawings of the self-taught, Mexican-born artist Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), whose work first came to the art world’s attention in the early 1970s, and who has earned a place as a genre-defining giant in the canon of outsider art’s still-evolving history.

Ramirez’s work is hardly unfamiliar to many art aficionados, but its history and meanings are still not entirely understood, even by experts. Three years ago, the American Folk Art Museum exhibited a group of hitherto unknown drawings Ramírez had made during the final years of his life. They had been selected from a cache of more than 140 works that a northern-California family had found in its garage and were dubbed, in that exhibition’s title, “The Last Works.” That presentation, which came a year after a Ramírez retrospective at the same museum, unexpectedly forced a reconsideration of the autodidact artist’s life and oeuvre. Last week, the New York gallery Ricco/Maresca opened “Martín Ramírez: Landscapes,” a show that provides yet another opportunity   to reexamine a legendary outsider’s singular artistic accomplishments.

Both within the context of Ramírez’s own body of work, with its distinctive draftsmanship and signature, sensuous forms, and more broadly speaking, within the field of 20th-century drawing, the works on view expand and deepen the meaning of what landscape images can be. Another reason this show may be a milestone in the history of the investigation of Ramírez’s work is that it marks the first time another batch of pictures from the “last works” is being shown publicly and, at the same time, that a few pieces that have emerged from one of the best-known-to-exist but never seen private collections of this artist’s work are being publicly displayed. The source of those latter works: the collection of the Chicago-based, husband-and-wife painters Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson.

That any of these works are being shown publicly now is the result of a complex set of private legal agreements between the individuals who many years ago discovered them, received them as gifts or purchased them and Ramirez’s heirs. These heirs, who are based in California, stepped forward several years ago, upon the news of the discovery and authentication of the “last works,” and asserted a claim to them. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before a known, intact, large group of Ramírez works like that in Mr. Nutt and Ms. Nilsson’s possession would be targeted with a similar claim. However, since, legally, none of the parties involved in the agreements with the entity the heirs created, the Estate of Martín Ramírez, can speak about them, the scope of the estate’s existing and potential, future claims cannot be known. Ricco/Maresca is the Ramírez estate’s official—and exclusive—agent for the artist’s artworks. The legal firm Boundas, Skarzynski, Walsh & Black, LLC of New York, Chicago, Princeton and London, notes on its website that it represents the estate and that the artist’s heirs “include 13 adult grandchildren who now receive compensation for the drawings, ‘Life Story Rights,’ and copyright issues.”

Ramirez’s works are intriguing to collectors not merely for the fact that they are stunning—which they are­—but also because of their maker’s life story. In the field of outsider art, aspects of an artist’s biography and the story of how his or her work became known often are inextricably linked. In Ramírez’s case, to be familiar with them is to be able to appreciate more fully Ricco/Maresca’s showing of some never-before-seen masterworks.

The son of a sharecropper from a devout, Catholic family, Ramírez was born and brought up in Jalisco, the state in west-central Mexico that is closely linked to such Mexican cultural icons as mariachis, ranchera music and tequila. He received no formal education, but his father taught him basic reading and writing skills. A capable jinete (horseman), he owned his own horse and a pistol, two potent symbols of status and machismo. They did not help Ramírez pay for his own piece of land, though, so in 1925, like many Mexicans from poor, rural areas, he headed north to the U.S.

In California, he is believed to have worked as a miner and a railroad-builder. In 1930, following the Cristero Rebellion, a Mexican civil war in which armed Catholics fought the federal government’s secularizing forces, Ramírez decided to stay in the U.S.

How he survived the Great Depression in “El Norte” is unknown, but in 1931, drifting and apparently mentally ill, he was picked up by police in California’s Central Valley. For many years, Ramírez was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and jails, and in 1948 was sent to DeWitt State Hospital, a former U.S. Army facility in Auburn, near Sacramento, which became his home until the end of his life. Back then, conditions at state “mental hospitals” in the U.S. were commonly described as abominable. Ramirez’s illnesses, which included schizophrenia and tuberculosis, were considered incurable, so he was not subjected to electric-shock treatments.

At DeWitt, he met Tarmo Pasto, a psychology professor and artist from a nearby college who took an interest in Ramirez’s drawings. He had been making pictures for years, starting with sketches on letters to his family in Mexico. Pasto gave him art supplies, but Ramírez continued to make many of his drawings using matchsticks dipped in a paste he made himself of melted crayon wax, fruit juice, charcoal, shoe polish and his own saliva. Crouching on the floor, he drew on and affixed collage elements to assorted found papers, which he glued together to make larger sheets using a paste he made from his saliva and masticated potatoes. Pasto, who studied artistic creativity in the mentally ill, featured Ramírez’s drawings in exhibitions on this theme that he organized and presented at regional venues.

DeWitt closed in 1972. Around that time, the artist Jim Nutt visited Pasto and saw the collection of around 300 works Pasto had received from Ramírez. Mr. Nutt shared the news of his find with Phyllis Kind, his Chicago-based dealer at that time. Like Mr. Nutt and other Chicago Imagist artists, Ms. Kind was interested in folk and outsider art. “I was always on the lookout for art that was unlike anything I had seen before,” Ms. Kind told me recently by telephone from San Francisco, where she lives in retirement. “The way forms erupted within Ramírez’s compositions, the way he choreographed his rhythmic line and his formal affinities with minimalist art—the sophistication, technical skill and originality I saw and felt in his art took my breath away.”

Mr. Nutt, Ms. Nilsson and Ms. Kind purchased almost all of Pasto’s Ramírezes and divided them up among themselves. Ms. Kind presented her first show of Ramírez’s work in Chicago in 1973. Being able to bring such striking, fresh material to market was a major coup for this dealer who played a big role in developing a market for outsider art in the U.S. Before the era of overhyped everything, on its own unmistakable merits, Ramírez’s art seized the outsider art field’s attention; today, it has found a new audience among contemporary-art collectors, curators and critics. Last year, the Museum of Modern Art acquired a Ramírez, Untitled (Alamentosa), a large, vertical-format work from around 1953 with an especially well-drawn train and repeating, decorative forms that create a sense of three-dimensional depth. Although the Mexican artist was no self-conscious modernist, MoMA appears to have recognized his work’s strong affinities with some of the definitive forms of modern art.

Those aesthetic links are evident in the pictures in the exhibition from the “last works” that were discovered in California in 2008. Several are variations of rows of rollicking arches that offer a playful response across the decades to Paul Klee’s well-known version of the same subject. Rhythmically geometric and mostly monochromatic, with dense patches of red or brown filling each arch’s shadowy depths, they would look right at home alongside Piet Mondrian’s grids, Frank Stella’s black, striped paintings or a stack of Sol Lewitt’s white cubes. In Untitled (Vertical Tunnel), circa 1960-63, and Untitled (Tunnel With Vertical Abstraction), circa 1952-55, Ramírez’s bold line undulates in jazzy romps that fill the pictorial space with throbbing abstract forms.

By contrast, works like Untitled (Abstract Patterns With Four Animals), circa 1953, with its wild beasts and a bird perched in mesa-like pedestals that float in space, and Untitled (Landscape With Horse and Rider), circa 1960-1963, Ramírez renders his subjects with the same precise line that once shaped ancient Aztec sculptures and that turned up, centuries later, in Diego Rivera’s illustrations for books and newspapers.

From the erstwhile Nutt-Nilsson holdings come such large, knock-out pieces as Untitled (Trains and Tunnels), circa 1952-53, and Untitled (Landscape with Seven Figures and Buildings), circa 1950. The former, a panoramic composition, features voluptuous examples of Ramírez’s familiar, snaking tunnels, whose rolling lengths of concentric forms resemble gigantic caterpillars. A steady stream of motorists in identical cars flows out of one tunnel into the erotic, black-void openings of two others, whose vibrant, yellow and red shadings are surrounded by purple archways. Elsewhere in this energetic image, a low-rise building lined on one side with a rectangular arcade and on another with a round-arch façade that recedes into the distance is topped by a row of boxy forms whose illusionistically rendered depths seem to penetrate the paper’s surface. In the latter picture, a tall, white-faced figure armed with a pistol looks across to a woman in a red dress on horseback. She plies a kind of elevated track, while costumed figures resembling those from Mexican posadas (religious pageants) move around a majestic building with two domed, arcaded towers.

John Maizels, the founder and editor of Raw Vision, the U.K.-based magazine about the work of self-taught artists, notes of Ramírez’s newly unveiled landscapes: “These previously unseen works serve to emphasize his huge importance and vital place in the art of America of the 20th century.” “Martín Ramírez: Landscapes” offers viewers a deeper understanding of this enigmatic artist’s way of depicting his forsaken homeland and the scenery of a vividly imagined inner world. To spend time in its strange, elegant terrain is to grasp an unwittingly modern outsider’s way of looking at the “real” world, too—as a restless play of exuberant lines and patterns, free-floating memories and mysterious, seductive forms.

editorial@observer.com