Mel Ramos (1935-2018) American, Oil on Canvas. Signed and titled on back: "Self Portrait." Depicts the artist, unfinished.

Provenance: Estate of Mel and Leta Ramos.

Depth: 1 1/2 in.

Overall size: 27 X 31 1/2 in.

Sight size: 19 1/4 X 23 1/2 in.

#1512 .

Melvin John Ramos was born in July 1935 in Sacramento, California. He enrolled at Sacramento State College in 1954, where he studied under Wayne Thiebaud. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1957 and a master’s degree the next year. At first experimenting with abstract expressionism, he eventually shifted into painting superheroes like Batman and Superman. In 1955 he married Leta Alice Helmers, and early in his career she was often his model. Along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein his work was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963. By the late 1960s he was at the heart of the Pop Art movement, drawing praise and ire alike for his graphically rendered, semi-pornographic paintings of nude women, often in compromising situations and on unorthodox objects like candy boxes and glassware. From 1966 until his retirement in 1997, Mr. Ramos taught at California State University, Hayward. His work is in permanent collections in the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He died of heart failure in October 2018 in Oakland, California.