MYSTERY TRAIN.

Martin Ramirez, a Mexican laborer who spent the last thirty-two of his sixty-eight years, until his death, in 1963, as an inmate of California mental hospitals, is my favorite outsider artist. Come to that, he's one of my favorite artists, period. His retrospective at the American Folk Art Museum is a marvel and a joy. The power of his often large drawings of trains, horsemen, and madonnas almost renders moot the old, crabbed issue of outsiderness, the wildwood creativity of asocial and eccentric--perhaps mad--loners, which is sentimentalized by some art people and shunned by most. Ramirez remains obscure, though his work has been widely shown since it was discovered by art-world insiders (the Chicago artist Jim Nutt and the dealer Phyllis Kind), in the late nineteen-sixties. Outsider art--lately euphemized as "self-taught," a vapid label that inconveniently describes originality in general--comes from and goes nowhere in art history. (The outsider is a culture of one.) It defeats normal criticism's tactics of context and comparison. It is barbaric. Can we skirt the imbroglio and regard Ramirez as an ordinary artist with extraordinary qualities? Let's see.

Remarkably little is known of him. From a family of sharecroppers in the conservative, largely Spanish-Creole state of Jalisco, Ramirez became a small rancher, with a wife and four children. Local legend remembers him as a superb horseman. In 1925, deeply in debt, he joined a mighty flow of Mexican workers to the United States for temporary railroad and mining jobs. Starting in 1926, the three-year Cristero Rebellion--in which pious Catholics battled the Draconian anticlerical measures of President Plutarco Elias Calles--raged in Jalisco. Tens of thousands died, on both sides. The Ramirez ranch was devastated. Recent research has uncovered a strange tale: Ramirez misunderstood a letter from home to say that his wife had joined the hated Federal forces, and he vowed never to return. In any case, the family lost track of him for years and, but for a nephew's visit in 1952, had no further contact with him. In 1931, he was picked up by police, apparently deracinated, in San Joaquin County, California, and committed to Stockton State Hospital. In 1948, he was moved to DeWitt State Hospital, near Sacramento. It seems that he made drawings from at least the late twenties on. A sheaf of them sent from Stockton to his family, in 1948, was hung outdoors and later destroyed. What survives is only his mature work, from fifteen years at DeWitt, in a style that must have undergone considerable evolution. Ramirez attracted the enthusiastic attention of Tarmo Pasto, a psychologist and artist who collected and showed his drawings--one exhibition was called "The Art of a Schizophrene"--and provided him with materials and privileges. In a corner of a ward of some seventy inmates, Ramirez alone had a worktable. He rarely spoke but had, by all accounts, a pleasant disposition. He was given a diagnosis of incurable schizophrenia, tending toward catatonia. Could he have handled normal life among his own people in rural Mexico? There's no telling now.

Rhythmic, expertly managed compositions carve out pictorial space in either, or both, of two ways: with straight hatchings that establish stepped, stagelike recesses; or with curved hatchings that describe receding mounds and valleys. A horseman (at times, a woman), festooned with banderillas and aiming a cocked pistol, or the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, a snake at her feet, commonly inhabits the proscenium. Trains or lines of cars slither amid the mounds, entering or exiting dark tunnels. Incidental figures and decorative motifs are deftly integrated in extended formats as much as eight feet high or ten feet long. Except for many reworkings of the horseman--which I surmise was popular with Ramirez's audience at DeWitt--variation of design and image is constant, full of surprises. The imagery--which includes stags and other animals, cityscapes with churches, and mysterious arcades--looks childlike but is far from ...