The American artist Mel Ramos left us in October 2018 at the age of 83 and leaves us a comprehensive oeuvre that is bursting with female sexuality. Vulgar and sexist critics at the time called his works and the popular pop art representative was probably controversial for his revealing representations.
How could you describe your style as value -free as possible, without straight away in the formulations neither of its admirers nor its critics?
Cheeky - provocative - brightly colored - popular - sexy - consumer -critical - effectively - superficial - bright - happy - humorous? Maybe a mixture of all these attributes and much more. "
Looking at sober, you can call your pictures as female acts in a connection with popular, oversized branded articles-as a pin-up girls in typical arrangements from the advertising of the 1950s and 1960s. Such branded products were, for example, cigars, cigarette boxes, soft drinks, chewing gum, chocolate and automobiles.
Photo by Vernissagefan [CC BY-SA 3.0]
Behind this oversubscribed representation of female sexuality parody or satire on the very common advertising cutter with a clear sex-seller approach may be suspected. At that time it was a common practice to fire the lust for the consumer -like population with sexual stimuli.
The so-called "Commercial Pin-Ups" became the unmistakable trademark of Mel Ramos for decades. This gave him an unusual but no less important place in the history of pop art .
But let's start from the front and in turn.
Profile - important key data at a glance
The most important key data on the pop art pin-up artist:
| name | Melvin John Ramos |
| Birthday | July 24, 1935 in Sacramento (USA) |
| Day of death | October 14, 2018 in Oakland (USA) |
| nationality | US |
| Profession | painter |
| Training and studies | Sacramento State College |
| Kunsteepoche (N) | Pop art, figurative painting, comic art, contemporary art |
| Important works | "Donut Doll" (2018) "Lola Cola" (1972) "Hav a Havana" series (2010s) "Hav-A-Havana 10" (2015) "Virnaburger" (1965) "Five Flavor Fannie (Life Savers)" (2006) "Wonder Woman" |
| Similar artists | Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana |
| Famous quote | "I make sure that my pictures are not too erotic and always contain a pinch of humor. I make sure that they are tasteful. Either you understand it or not." |
Mel Ramos in the short portrait
Mel Ramos is an outstanding American artist whose work has taken a permanent place in the history of pop art. Born in 1935 in the United States, he had the privilege of experiencing the significant cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. This time was characterized by revolutionary changes in the art world and a departure in the direction of new creative forms of expression, which Ramos fully gave himself with his artistic vision.
After completing his studies at Sacramento State College, where he studied under the renowned artist and teacher Wayne Thiebaud, Ramos started a remarkable career as an artist and educator. His teaching activities at various American universities, including California State University, testify to his commitment, knowledge and passion for art to the next generation.
Mel Ramos's works are lively testimonies of his examination of pop art. They often integrate elements from advertising, act painting in a pin-up style and mass culture and thus create a provocative connection between everyday objects, provocative female nudity and artistic reflection.
His pictures radiate a unique aesthetics that is both visually powerful and stimulating. So it was made possible for him to present his work in numerous exhibitions in both the United States and in Europe - especially in countries such as Germany and Austria, where his work met with great recognition.
Image Source: Flickreviewr, via Wikimedia Commons
Biography - his early years
Mel Ramos was born on July 24, 1935 as the son of Portuguese immigrants in Sacramento, California and studied art at Sacramento Junior College (Bachelor's degree in 1957) and later at Sacramento State College (end 1958). In fact, he remained a member of the faculty there until 1997, when he was finally released into well -deserved retirement as an emeritated university professor.
During his apprenticeship at Sacramento State, he was significantly shaped by the well-known pop artist Wayne Thiebaud as a student, under whose guidance he acquired his master's degree there. As a result, he also came into contact with the Bay Area Figurative School , which he was very close to for a few years.
However, he gradually turned away from the abstract expressionism of the 50s, which also included the art movement of action painting and color field painting. At the beginning of the 1960s, Mel Ramos started drawing and painting comic characters-in the spirit of the time. The superheroes of the very beginning were among his early work: Superman, Batman, The Specter and Wonder Woman.
Pop art era and pin-up girls
In the early 1960s, the western world changed in a dramatic manner and it took place a profound social change. It was times of the departure that were felt in almost all areas of everyday life. Starting with childlike life, growing up, family through school, fashion, technology and also in art.
It was an incredibly exciting time with many great social and political events and upheavals. After a few years of sadness, life became more colorful and louder again on the two world wars. Everything suddenly seemed possible.
In the midst of these times, a new, shrill and popular art movement also came on stage: pop art was born.
While Mel Ramos was never able to claim the same fame as his two contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, he still played an important role for the first generation of American pop art artists and can certainly be counted among the pioneers of this style.
He was one of 12 artists who together with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963 raised the new art movement and sown pop art The graphic style of his works was strongly influenced by the visual language of the comic books. Likewise, the work of his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg have inspired him.
Ramos fully plunged with the presentation of pin-ups , which experienced enormous popularity in these years. In particular, the sexually revealing display of female comic characters and superheroes like Wonder Woman determined his first works in this genre. Pin-up girls should remain the nucleus of its entire creative process.
The image of the femme fatal was shaped by sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield, who perfectly embodied Hollywood's glamor and fame and smiled millions of men and made millions of women dream. The longings of an entire generation were found in it.
Ramos took up this staging of the perfect female body full of grace, beauty and seduction in its Commercial Pinup Girls and, through their arrangement with consumer goods and products from known advertising forms, created a satirical examination of this staging of beauty ideals on the one hand and a subtle criticism of the mechanisms of the advertising machine on the other.
Through his work, he also addressed the role of the female body in the emerging materialism of the social life that was prospering for the first time after World War II.
In an interview with Artnet News, Ramo's former gallery owner Louis K. Meisel his first meeting with the artist. Although the revealing representation of naked women in incentive Poznan was very radical at the time, Meisel did not hesitate long and immediately signed in - perhaps also because of his unconventional appearance and his personality as an artist - with his renowned gallery in New York. This connection held from 1971 to the end and was crowned with extraordinary success.
He lived and worked throughout his life in the California city of Oakland and in the municipality of Horta de Sant Joan in Spain.
First solo exhibitions and collections
In 1963 Mel Ramos exhibited his works together with Warhol and Lichtenstein in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
his first pop art single exhibition in 1964 in the Bianchini gallery in New York. The contemporary witness and then art critic Elisabeth Stevens wrote for ArtNews about this exhibition:
Mel Ramos brings a touch of carnival from California ... his work is effective, the colors brightly brightly colored and the motifs are very attention. As a painter, Ramos is not a Playboy, and as with his mentor Wayne Thibaud, his realism is uncompromising, brave and never academic. "
Two years later, he even went to Germany and his works were exhibited in the Ricke gallery in Kassel in 1966.
The following year he was recognized again in his homeland California - more precisely in San Francisco - with another solo exhibition. According to reports, the American feminist Judy Chicago was said to have run through the rooms screaming and also insulted the museum director Wüst.
In 1967 he organized another exhibition in Germany, this time in Cologne. There was a violent scandal. A large part of the works on display were covered by the police.
The reason for this campaign was pictures of his "Animal Paintings" picture series , whose motifs were clearly too sexist for the authorities for that time. They showed women in clear sexual poses with animals. This went too far to many those responsible for the regulatory authorities and they decided to cover the works. You can think of the media echo afterwards.
In 1972 Ramos began publishing his works in the "Unfinished Paintings" - these pictures were a satirical of classic nude pictures of the old masters. The simple and often innocent eroticism of the masterpieces of Manet , Ingres and Modigliani were replaced by incentive pinups and led to absurdity.
This was followed by important exhibitions in renowned galleries worldwide, including in the Kunsthalle Tübingen (2010), in the Villa Stuck in Munich (2011) and in the Vienna Albertina (2012).
A selection of other important exhibitions in chronological order:
- 1963: Participation in Pop Art exhibitions in the Oakland Museum of California and in the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston
- 1965: Participation in the group exhibition Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, etc. in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
- 1966: Participation in the hiking exhibition 11 Pop Artists by the USA
- 1969: Single exhibition in Germany in oncoming traffic, Center for Current Art, in Aachen
- 1972: Single exhibition in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
- 1974: Participation in a pop art exhibition in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York
- 1975: Single exhibition in the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld
- 1977: First retrospective in the Oakland Museum of California
- 1991: Participation in the large international hiking exhibition »Pop Art« (Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
- 1999: Participation in the print -graphic group exhibition »Pop Impressions« in the Museum of Modern Art, New York
- 2007: Participation in the exhibition Pop Art Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery in London and in the State Gallery in Stuttgart
- 2012: Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Superheroes, Nudes, and other Pop Delights, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, USA (individual exhibition); Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany
- 2013: PIN UP Girls Gallery Frank Fluegel, Nuernberg; Pinups & Portraits - Icon LTD, Santa Monica, USA
- 2014: The beautiful and the beast, Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig, Germany; Everybody Needs a Hero, Scott Richards Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA, USA
- 2015: Mel Ramos. My Age of Pop. Ludwig Museum Koblenz
- 2017: Mel Ramos: Editions and Drawings, Frank Fluegel Gallery, Nuernberg, Germany
Especially in Europe, Ramos's works have experienced a real revival in recent years. 2010-2011 made a large-scale retrospective as an artist as part of the 50th anniversary of Pop Art, and stopped in Munich's Villa Stuck, the Kunsthalle Tübingen and in the Albertina in Vienna.
His home country - the United States - received its own retrospective in 2012 when the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento under the title "Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Superheroes, Nudes, and Other Pop Delights" honored the artist.
At the beginning of September last year - shortly before his death - Mel Ramos opened an exhibition of his works in Hamburg. At this point, nobody expected the artist that was immediately impending.
A month later, the exhibition "Mel Ramos - Superheroes of 1963" with six of his first 18 pictures, which can be attributed to Pop Art, in his "house gallery" - the Louis K. Meisel Gallery. The artist no longer experienced the end of this work show on November 10, 2018.
Collections and permanent exhibitions
The work of the painter and graphic artist has been included in numerous renowned collections and permanent exhibitions over the years and decades, including:
USA
- Museum of Modern Art, NYC
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
- Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles + Chicago
- Seattle Art Museum
- Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento
Germany
- State gallery, Stuttgart
- Hamburger Kunsthalle
- Kunsthalle Darmstadt
- Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen
Austria
- Albertina, Vienna
- Museum of modern art, Vienna
Even the Playboy Magazin picked up his works and published a book with a collection of his sexy pin-up girls. You can currently pictures of Mel Ramos (e.g. as a limited lithograph or linen leaf) via our online gallery and the Galerie Zimmermann & Heitmann .
Print graphics and lithographs in the center of artistic work
Since the 1950s, Pop Art Artist Mel Ramos has been focusing on print graphics, especially lithographs and screen prints. Together with printers, he developed innovative printing methods, which he combined with hand -painted accents and photographic reproductions.
In our extensive selection of Mel Ramos lithographs, his characteristic representations of mostly undressed pin-up models stand out, which posing with oversized consumer goods from lively, monochrome backgrounds. Works such as "Reese's Rose" , "Lola Cola" and the "Hav-A-Havanna" series, in which the models are lasciviously on huge cigars, are particularly remarkable.
Everyday foods are also staged humorously, as in the "Donut Doll" , which is an allusion to a well -known advertising campaign.
Other lithographs of Mel Ramos combine provocatively female acts with animals, such as in "Giant Panda" , which is reminiscent of his former "Animal Painting" series. Ramos also quotes art -historical works, for example with the representation of a naked woman in the lithography "Nude Descending A Staircase" , which refers to famous paintings on Ducamp's.
In "Drawing Lesson" the creation process of the factor draws is discussed, while other works such as "Lola Cola #4" can be seen similarities to prominent personalities like Michelle Pfeiffer.
Successes, perception and criticism
Violent headwind of conservative and feminist circles
His first works, which mostly contained the representation of superheroes, historical files and palm trees, were sometimes dismissed by critics as not very valuable or even kitsch. However, this perception changed when he turned to his central work and dedicated favorite topic-the pin-up girls.
Due to the freedom of movement and the way of the display of naked women's bodies, Ramos came into violent criticism early in the 1960s. This was primarily due to conservative and reactionary, but also from many women and feminists. They described his works as vulgar, backward, humiliating and degrading. Especially towards the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s, when feminism spread, Ramos probably felt some headwinds.
In 1972, critic Linda Aschenlin an essay of the Arstnew's "Women as Sex Object" about the supposedly fetishistic and degrading nature of his pictures. In later years, female pop artists such as Marisol and Marjorie Strider are said to have settled his pictures in a similar way.
This wall of criticism is paradoxical if one makes it clear that these pictures are inherent in a satirical intention and critical note against the staging of women as pure sex symbols to market profane goods. So was sexism accused of anti-sexism?
In an interview from 2010 that the publisher Hatje Cantz led to Ramos to these allegations, the artist vehemently refuted all sexist content in his work:
I also painted male portraits, but one thing is right: I am interested in the female body. Why? What should I say? I love women, I am a healthy, male American. And certainly women are desirable for me. "
Although the naked female body seems to be the superficial element in his pictures, Ramos repeated that he saw the face as the most important part of a woman. This is the foundation for every new work. At the same time, he always stood for more nudity in public. The undressed state was not erotically connoted, but rather an expression of naturalness. So you could almost go so far and claim that he was a advocate of the nudist movement and a confessing naturalist.
When he once went to an exhibition in the Louvre in 2012 and found dozens of acts - including wonderful works by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto - he felt confirmed in his work. He decided not to be defensive against his work.
It is also interesting in this context that provocation and the sparking of a controversy were probably never the artist's intention. He emphasized that he did not try to paint provocative and deliberately offensive pictures in order to deliberately annoy or raise people. Quite different from Pablo Picasso, , with his pornographically created works.
So Ramos did not see himself as a critic of his time, but rather as an observer who does not want to break gender debates from the fence and does not consider art as an instrument to bring (political, socially critical) messages to the people.
Successes and auction prices
The criticism apparently did not harm him - at least not as to the development of his popularity and artistic career.
His works were extremely in demand on the art market, achieving broad and persistent attention as well as maximum prices for galleries and auctions. a Marilyn Monroe act was auctioned in Vienna for 173,000 euros in 2016. Even limited art prints are hardly available under a four -digit amount.
The fact that Pop Art does not seem to get out of fashion may also have contributed to this. It has its own charm and a special attraction on us. The ambivalence from the apparent superficiality on the one hand and the inherent profoundness on the other is practicing a strong fascination. Pop Art combines playful ease with serious criticism so that we cannot avoid it.
Despite the very successful career as an artist, some viewers ask themselves why he has remained in the shade compared to his colleagues Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein - regarding attention, fame and economic success.
According to the Artnet database, the auction record of one of his works with £ 1.07 million was recorded by Sotheby`s (2012). This is only a fraction of what Warhol and Lichtenstein brought in at auctions.
His gallery owner Meisel provided a plausible explanation in an interview with ArtNews . Accordingly, this was simply due to the productive output of Ramos compared to Tom Wesselman, Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
If you compare the bare numbers, then Warhol created about 36,000 works, Wesselman between 8,000 and 10,000 in the course of his artistic work. Since Ramos developed a large part of his work in laborious detailed work and kept his full-time job as a professor at California State University (1966-1997), Ramos probably does not even come to 1,000 works in his lifetime. Therefore, he could not be collected in the extent of people interested in art, gallery owners, museums and patrons.
Buy works of art from Mel Ramos
Originals from Mel Ramos are costly and difficult to purchase (see auction record at Sotheby`s above).
However, you will find limited colored fashion from Mel Ramos in the online gallery of Kunstplaza at affordable prices:
You can get even more motif selection from the following galleries:
- Zimmermann & Heitmann
- Pop Art Shop (a brand of Davisklemmgallery GmbH & Co. KG)
- Galerie Kaschenbach
- Van Ham
- Quince tree art auctions
And here is the official website of Mel Ramos with an overview of biography, works and exhibitions.
What remains ...
In October 2018, Mel Ramos died in his hometown Oakland at the age of 83. According to his daughter and studio manager Rochelle Leininger, the cause of death was heart failure.
In addition to his tocher, his wife Leta and his son Skot and almost 1,000 paintings and drawings, he leaves as an oeuvre for posterity. His cheeky, colorful and sometimes absurd works will continue to amuse, maintain and encourage us to think.
As one of the pioneers, he has a significant part in the fact that Pop Art fascinates and inspires us over many decades. At the same time, through his teaching at California State, he is likely to have influenced and shaped countless young artists in their development and creative process for more than 30 years.
So his legacy for the world of art is not high enough.
The following statement by his former gallery owner Martin Muller opposite the San Francisco Chronicle is suitable as an obituary from the ranks of his contemporaries:
Ramos was a remarkable person, artist and teacher. Over numerous political and social trends and changes in the art world, he always remained focused on the creative act of painting, with passion, dedication and discipline. "
Owner and managing director of Kunstplaza. Publicist, editor and passionate blogger in the field of art, design and creativity since 2011. Successful conclusion in web design as part of a university degree (2008). Further development of creativity techniques through courses in free drawing, expression painting and theatre/acting. Profound knowledge of the art market through many years of journalistic research and numerous collaborations with actors/institutions from art and culture.
