Mel Ramos

(b Sacramento, CA, 24 July 1935).

American painter and printmaker. He studied in California at San Jose State College (1955-6) and Sacramento State College, where he received his MFA in 1958. His early paintings, influenced by the work of his friend and mentor Wayne Thiebaud, were figurative studies in thick impasto and muted tones of grey. In 1961 he started to paint comic-book superheroes, such as Superman (1961; see E. Claridge, p. 28), using a brighter palette. These were quickly followed by portraits of heroines from similar sources; by gradually emphasizing their sexuality and refining the quality of the paint, he produced increasingly vibrant and slick images. These paintings led to his trademark images of scantily clad or nude girls, taken from the pages of 'pin-up' magazines such as Playboy and pictured as if playing a role in a cartoon or commercial. In Miss Grapefruit Festival (1964; San Francisco, CA, MOMA), the model's smiling head and torso are surrounded by grapefruit, with the 'Sunkist' logo in the background. Ramos was identified with the Pop art movement because of his investigation of the iconography of such mass-produced sources as magazines, comics and advertisements; although his work of the early 1960s was at odds with Pop in its painterly technique, he went further than most in courting vulgarity, bad taste and sexual imagery, arousing antagonism from feminists. His concentration on the female nude continued beyond the Pop portraits of the 1960s when he began work in 1972 on a series of paintings that recreated art historical masterpieces by artists such as David, Ingres and Manet. His pastiches of these well-known images, such as David's Duo (1973; see E. Claridge, p. 150), continued to display a Pop sensibility in the way they parodied paintings that had become so recognizable as to be part of popular culture. In the late 1970s Ramos also began to paint landscapes, often in watercolour, that have the slickness of the earlier art history nudes, but which are involved more with the quality of the paint than with the imagery; Oakland (1978, see 1980 exh. cat., p. 9) is a view of the city where he had lived and worked since 1966. In the 1980s he returned to the subject of the nude, presenting his models in more naturalistic settings, whilst still playing with the history image of a naked young woman walking down the stairs of the artist's studio, addressing the viewer of the male artist as voyeur. Nude Descending a Staircase (1989; see R. Rosenblum, p. 87), while borrowing both its title and subject-matter from Marcel Duchamp's celebrated painting of 1912, is a wholly contemporary with a firm and confident gaze. (Source: CATHERINE M. GRANT, "Mel Ramos," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, (Oxford University Press, Accessed July 16, 2004)