Melvin John Ramos (*July 24, 1935, † October 14, 2018 in Oakland, California) was born to Portuguese immigrants in Sacramento, California. He studied art at Sacramento Junior College and Sacramento State College.
As a student of Wayne Thiebaud, Mel Ramos was close to the so-called Bay Area Figurative School, which from the 1950s onwards distanced itself from the Abstract Expressionism that was prevalent in the USA at the time. In 1961, Mel Ramos began painting comic characters such as Batman, Superman and The Spectre.
From 1963 onwards he turned to the central theme of his work: via female superheroes such as Wonder Woman, he came to depict pin-up girls and typical arrangements from advertising, which are intended to sell products through the depiction of provocative female sexuality. This resulted in pictures in which he draped women "in vulgar, vital poses on painted articles of merchandise, thereby parodying the trivial glamour gestures of an advertising gimmick that fuels the desire to buy with sexual stimuli." These "commercial pin-ups" were to remain Mel Ramos' trademark for decades. In the 1960s, he was criticized for his explicit depictions of women by conservatives and later by feminists. His first solo exhibition took place in 1966 at the Galerie Ricke in Kassel. At a solo exhibition in 1967, Ramos' pictures were banned by the Cologne police: The exhibition had shown works from his series "Animal Paintings," which combined women in explicit poses with animals such as seals, kangaroos and hippos.
From 1972 onwards, Ramos satirised the nude paintings of classical masters such as Ingres, Modigliani and Manet in his "Unfinished Paintings", replacing their subtle eroticism with the more direct sex appeal of pin-ups. Ramos used further quotations from art history in his series "I still get a thrill when I see Bill" and "The Transfiguration of Galatea", in which he used the works of Willem de Kooning and ancient sculptures as subjects.
From 1966 to 1997, Ramos taught as a professor of painting at California State University in Hayward.
