Artist Unknown - Unique Vintage Circus Poster Maquettes

Ricco/Maresca’s main booth features a group of gouache paintings that are the original artwork for classic American circus posters. These one-of-a-kind maquettes, made between 1925 and 1940, exist at the intersection of circus advertisement and its fascinating artistic potential, which reached its apex between the late 19th century and the mid-20th century.

Originally a duplicate of its European counterpart, the circus in America quickly transcended its antebellum format to become a unique extravaganza inconceivable elsewhere. Scholars link the portable design of the American circus to the country’s vast frontier; its scope to the nineteenth-century expansion of the railroad system, connecting eastern cities to the Wild West; and its broad appeal and flamboyant aesthetic to the wit and grit of some of the nation’s early capitalist trailblazers, who recognized that fantasy was big business.

The works in Ricco/Maresca’s booth (just a sample of which is presented here) depict many of the emblematic motifs of the three-ring circus and its different acts, as well as more mysterious scenes of lyrical beauty. Their vibrant color combinations, meant to captivate the attention of the average passerby almost a hundred years ago, are remarkably preserved for the viewers of the present in sophisticated compositions still fresh with vigor and theatricality.

Martín Ramírez (1895 - 1963)

Born in Jalisco, Mexico, Martín Ramírez is widely known as one of the preeminent self-taught masters of the 20th century. Thrust by political and religious upheavals caused by the Mexican Revolution and seeking to support his family, Ramírez relocated to the United States in 1925. He worked as an impoverished immigrant in the California mines and railroads until he was picked up by police in 1931—reportedly in a disoriented state. He was committed first at Stockton State Hospital and then at the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, where he spent the rest of his life. It was there where he discovered art and created the complex and compelling drawings for which he is known.

Over the course of his life, Ramírez produced around 500 works. The imagery is often reminiscent of his own life experiences: Mexican Madonnas, animals, cowboys, trains, and landscapes merge with scenes of American culture and create a profound documentation of a Mexican living and working in the United States. Compositionally, he renders space into multi-dimensional layouts, often using rhythmic repetition and gentle shading. Later in his life, he incorporated collage into his works, adding newspaper clippings and previous drawings for depth and texture.

In 2015, the United States Postal Service released a set of 5 commemorative Martin Ramírez Forever stamps, which marked the first time that an Outsider artist and a Mexican immigrant was featured on a USPS Stamp.

Outside In: A Review of Martin Ramírez in the New York Times

Joe Massey (1895 – ?)

The long-demolished Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus was the bleak outpost where Joe Massey’s story rose above what was, by all accounts, a dejected life. Whether in the past he pursued artistic endeavors is unclear, but only a few years into his Ohio incarceration, the pioneering surrealist magazine View—whose contributors included Picasso, Duchamp, Nabokov, and Sartre—began printing inmate no. 75209’s drawings and poems.

At some point in the early 1940s, Massey started sending letters and submissions, addressed to Charles Henri Ford (“Editor Sr”), to the View headquarters in New York City. Ford was surely intrigued and impressed with the radical otherness of Massey’s letters and creative output; they were windows to a world drastically unlike his own yet very much in tune with the spirit of the avant-garde.

In his drawings the dark cloud of Massey’s past has lifted and the sun shines with a smirk. With an absolute economy of means he created a visual lexicon that speaks with vigor and whimsy. The artist presents surreal visions as matters of fact; his everyday vignettes cast a dreamlike glow. The viewer is dropped into a kind of vaudeville that’s packed with action, motion, and emotion—and reinforced by Massey’s consistent use of words; a fragment of dialogue or a call and response between characters.

Massey’s life is a testimony of the unfathomable complexities of being human, but his art remains thrilling and irreducible—flourishing as much from seclusion as it did from exposure and a profound yearning to be heard.

Joe Massey Art Forum Article

Renaldo Kuhler (1931 – 2013)

Renaldo Kuhler was born in New Jersey and raised near New York City. In 1948, when Kuhler was 16, his father (a German-born industrial designer) retired from the railroad business and moved the family to a remote cattle ranch in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Kuhler found the isolation of the ranch almost unbearable, and secretly retreated to a fantasy world of his own invention, an imaginary country he called Rocaterrania. He set out to illustrate the history of this nation in plain spiral bound notebooks and other scraps of paper.

What had initially begun as an escape became a secret lifelong quest to illustrate the history of Rocaterrania, one fraught with turmoil and political intrigue. With Rocaterrania, Kuhler created an intricately coded, metaphoric account of his own struggles for independence and freedom from a family, and a society, that had consistently rejected him. He systematically isolated the internal and external forces in his life and fleshed them out with voices, settings, and backstories to make sense of them, sublimating his despair into a cohesive, fully imagined world, and an astounding body of work.