Mel Ramos

Mel Ramos is a survey monograph on the American Pop artist, published jointly by Gingko Press and Electa and edited by curator Walter Guadagnini. It gathers Ramos's paintings across five decades. The range runs from the superhero pastiches he made in the late 1950s to the pin-up nudes paired with animals or oversized consumer goods that became his signature.

Ramos trained under Wayne Thiebaud at Sacramento State. He emerged alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist as part of the first Pop generation, though his work stayed closer to figure painting and pinup illustration than to their commercial-graphics sources. The book traces that path through reproductions of the paintings alongside Guadagnini's critical essay, which places Ramos within, and often against, the Pop mainstream.

Ramos taught for over three decades at California State University, East Bay. He kept painting his pin-up-and-product pairings into the 2000s, and this monograph is one of the more complete surveys of that body of work in print.