Mel Ramos

A Sacramento Pop painter

Melvin John Ramos was born in 1935 in Sacramento, California, into a first generation Portuguese and Azorean immigrant family, and died in Oakland in 2018. He studied at Sacramento Junior College and San Jose State College and took his degrees at Sacramento State College. One of his earliest teachers was Wayne Thiebaud, who became his mentor and stayed his friend for life. Ramos taught in Sacramento high schools for most of a decade before beginning a long career at California State University, East Bay, in Hayward, where he eventually became professor emeritus. He was artist in residence at Syracuse University and at the University of Wisconsin. He married Leta Helmers, who modelled for many of the early nudes.

Superheroes, then commercial pin ups

His first important recognition came in the early sixties. With Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol he was among the first painters to take images straight from comic books, and work by the three was shown together at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963. His early canvases were of superheroes. He then turned to the subject that came to define him, the commercial pin up: voluptuous nudes emerging from cornstalks and banana skins, popping out of candy wrappers and lounging in martini glasses, painted with the high finish of advertising art and set against flat fields of colour. Alongside Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann and Thiebaud, he made work that celebrated, and gently mocked, the imagery of mass media.

Prints, publishers and dealers

His editions matter to the saleroom as much as the paintings do. He showed first with Leo Castelli in New York, and after Ivan Karp introduced his work to the dealer Louis Meisel he was represented by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery for the rest of his life. In San Francisco he showed with Modernism, and in Europe with Galerie Ernst Hilger in Vienna and Burkhard Eikelmann in Dusseldorf, which is a large part of why so much of his print output was published and circulated on that side of the Atlantic. The prints are typically screenprints or lithographs in colours on wove paper, signed in pencil and numbered in editions of around one hundred, carrying the inkstamp of the publisher and the blindstamp of the printer. Two such sheets are catalogued here.

Museums and late retrospectives

A National Endowment for the Arts visual artists fellowship recognised him in mid career. The Albertina in Vienna gave him a major exhibition in 2011, and in 2012 the Crocker Art Museum in his native Sacramento opened a retrospective covering more than fifty years of work, his first American retrospective in decades and the first substantial showing of his painting in his home town. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Simon Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. He went on painting and publishing editions into his eighties.

The saleroom

Ramos has had a sustained secondary market since the sixties, with paintings and prints appearing regularly in international sales. The paintings of the classic Pop years trade far above the editions. A signed screenprint of Batman, Robin and the Batmobile, from an edition of one hundred published in Los Angeles, took a low four figure sum in dollars at Bonhams in New York in 2024, which is the band the two sheets offered here belong to. Buyers of these editions look closely at the pencil signature, the edition number, the publisher and printer stamps and the state of the wide margins, since the sheets were made to be framed and are often found trimmed or toned.