In Memory of Mel Ramos

Mel Ramos at Magnolia Editions

We are sad to report that longtime friend of the studio and Pop Art pioneer Mel Ramos passed away this weekend at the age of 83.

Born in Sacramento on July 24, 1935, Ramos studied art and art history at Sacramento State College. He taught at local high schools and held a teaching position at CSU Hayward from 1966-1997, continuing as an emeritus professor while teaching intermittently at CCAC (now California College of the Arts).

All the while Ramos maintained a highly prolific studio practice which, in addition to his signature oil paintings on canvas, encompassed a variety of printmaking techniques including silkscreen, etching, woodcut, and more.

Mel Ramos - Wonder Woman, 2014
woodcut with acrylic
image: 37 x 26.75 in. paper: 44 x 30 in.
Edition of 30

Ramos's work was exhibited and appreciated worldwide; in later years, he enjoyed great acclaim particularly in Germany, where it seemed there was a nearly continuous demand for his colorful, instantly recognizable Pop Art style.

In 2010, Villa Stuck in München, Germany mounted a major solo exhibition, "Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Pop Art," comprising five decades worth of work by Ramos including paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculptures. Another major exhibition of his work was held at the Albertina in Vienna, Austria in 2011.

German galleries and collectors figured prominently in the enthusiastic response to the editions Ramos published with Magnolia over the last several decades.

These projects included woodcut images of classic superheroes; tapestry versions of some of his most iconic paintings; a limited edition, laser-cut jigsaw puzzle featuring Ramos's take on comic book hero Captain Midnight; and the Albrecht Durer tribute Leta on Durer's Rhino, an etching with UV-cured acrylic ink on paper, executed at Magnolia with the help of master printers Tallulah Terryll and Nicholas Price and additional assistance from artist Guy Diehl.

Mel Ramos - Superman, 2014
woodcut with acrylic
image: 37 x 26.75 in. paper: 44 x 30 in.
Edition of 30

"Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Superheroes, Nudes, and Other Pop Delights," a retrospective of over 50 years of Ramos's work was exhibited at the Crocker Art Museum in his hometown of Sacramento in 2012.

Mel often visited Magnolia with his wife Leta and daughter/studio manager Rochelle Leininger. Below please find a gallery of memories from some of his recent visits.

Ramos with artwork by Don & Era Farnsworth; note his Mel Ramos t-shirt!

Ramos with an early proof of the UV ink layer of his 2015 Hawkman woodcut edition

Ramos with proofs of his 2015 Hawkman woodcut edition

Ramos and Guy Diehl with proof of his 2016 etching Leta on Durer's Rhino

Diehl, Ramos, and Don Farnsworth with proof of his 2016 etching Leta on Durer's Rhino

Ramos celebrating with Magnolia staff at Bay Wolf restaurant in Oakland, CA

A film crew captures Magnolia master printer Nicholas Price printing a Ramos woodcut at Magnolia

Ramos with proofs of his 2014 woodcut Wonder Woman

Don Farnsworth, Guy Diehl, Ramos, and master printers Nicholas Price and Tallulah Terryll with proofs of Ramos's 2014 woodcut Wonder Woman

Ramos editioning Wonder Woman with Tallulah Terryll and Rochelle Leininger

Farnsworth and Ramos with the latter's label design for Christian Tschida winery

Ramos at home in his Oakland studio with proofs of his 2016 etching Leta on Durer's Rhino

Rochelle Leininger, Mel Ramos and Leta Ramos at Ramos's studio with proofs of his 2016 etching Leta on Durer's Rhino

Portrait of Mel Ramos by Don Farnsworth

Portrait of Mel Ramos by Don Farnsworth

Ramos at home in his Oakland studio

Ramos with work by George Miyasaki at a memorial for Miyasaki

Ramos with Price and Ernst Hilger at Magnolia Editions

Mel and Leta Ramos with Beverly Berrish at Magnolia Editions

Ramos at Magnolia Editions

Portrait of Mel Ramos by Don Farnsworth

More art by Mel Ramos from Magnolia Editions

Ramos Superheroines Up Next

Mel Ramos - Superman, 2014. 37 x 26.75 in. Edition of 30
The response to Mel Ramos's Superman and Batman woodcut/acrylic editions has been tremendous!

Revisiting some of his earliest Pop Art paintings and released only four months ago, Ramos's superhero prints proved to be especially popular with his European audience; only seven sets were acquired by American collectors, while the rest were speedily dispatched overseas.

The Sacramento-born Ramos lives and works in Oakland, where he is equally well-loved: a Batman print donated to Flourish, an annual art auction held locally to benefit the Oakland Art Murmur organization, sold before auction at a price well over retail.

Mel Ramos - Batman, 2014. 37 x 26.75 in. Edition of 30
Magnolia director Donald Farnsworth credits the artist's commitment to broadening the scope of his practice, as well as the innovative hybrid techniques perfected by the staff at Magnolia: "Having worked with Mel for twenty years," Farnsworth says, "he has been consistently fearless in diving in to tapestry, digital/analog print combinations, and the variety of mad science experiments he is presented with at Magnolia."

Farnsworth also points to the unusual intersection of content and technique from multiple generations that coalesces in Superman and Batman. "In these prints," he explains, "we're using an Old World woodcut matrix – but the content is classic Pop Art, and the artist is using digital-age tools to manipulate the composition and direct the cutting of the wood block."

Judging from the extraordinary response to these editions, Ramos's heroes are still able to profoundly affect their audience more than half a century since Ramos decided to paint his favorite comic book characters in 1962 and Pop Art was born.

Magnolia Editions and the artist also donated a Superman print to San Francisco's M.H. de Young Museum, which in 2004 acquired the iconic 1962 canvas upon which Superman (2014) is based:

Mel Ramos - Superman, 1962. Oil on canvas. 45 x 32.5 inches

“It is the most historically significant Pop Art painting in our permanent collection,” noted de Young Curator of American Art Timothy Burgard in this excellent 2012 magazine profile of Ramos.

Besides signaling the beginning of Pop Art, Ramos's early superheroes also marked an important transition in the artist's subject matter. Once the de Kooning-inspired abstractions of his art school days gave way to the unambiguous figuration of Superman and Batman, it was only a matter of time (less than a year, in fact -- cf. 1962's Phantom Lady and Wonder Woman) before Ramos began painting superheroines, which ultimately led to the colorful female nudes for which he is best known.

Accordingly, the artist is currently working on a new set of woodcut editions that will revisit the superheroines of his Pop Art past. Stay tuned to this blog for details, or sign up for the Magnolia Editions mailing list.

For more details on the Batman and Superman woodcut editions, please see this press release:

New Editions: Woodcuts by Mel Ramos

Mel Ramos - Superman, 2014. 37 x 26.75 in. Edition of 30
Following the Mel Ramos retrospective that traveled across seven major European museums in 2010-2011 to celebrate Ramos’s 75th birthday and on the occasion of Batman’s 75th birthday this year, it seems only fitting that Magnolia Editions revisit the iconic superhero paintings that started Ramos on the road to becoming one of Pop Art’s most recognizable figures.

Mel Ramos - Batman, 2014. 37 x 26.75 in. Edition of 30
The artist worked closely with Magnolia director Donald Farnsworth and Bay Area realist painter and frequent Magnolia collaborator Guy Diehl to develop the wood block matrices and the corresponding layers of acrylic color for each print. Ramos is well known for his color lithograph editions (a 2006 lithograph revisited Superman) but these prints represent an unusual and bold move toward woodcut — a very different print medium and one which Ramos had rarely explored before this project.

Detail view of the woodblock matrix for Superman
For full details about the production of these two new editions, please read the press release at Magnolia's website:

More art by Mel Ramos at Magnolia Editions

New Chuck Close tapestry edition

Chuck Close - Roy, 2011
Jacquard tapestry, 87 x 74 in. Edition of 6
Magnolia Editions is pleased to announce the publication of Roy, Chuck Close's second tapestry edition of 2011.

There is a subtle irony in Close's hyper-realistic, hyper-detailed, black and white tapestry portrait of famed American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, whose own work memorably used lo-fi Ben-Day dots and bold colors to create images from a minimum of information.

Like Close’s Lucas, a portrait of Lucas Samaras published earlier this year, Roy is translated from a daguerreotype, one of the oldest and most richly detailed forms of early photography. The edition is also woven at a more intimate size than the artist's earlier tapestries, and the detail in its matte surface is due to a higher thread count and a new palette which includes wool fibers for several of the black values in the work.

The unprecedented detail and texture in Roy and Lucas have set a new standard, posing a timely challenge to an art world status quo that appears to have only recently (one might even say grudgingly) begun to accept contemporary textile work as a legitimate medium, just as it admitted so many other scruffy outsiders (lithography, ceramics, et al.) in previous decades. It was only three years ago that Yale professor Carol Armstrong seemed so befuddled by Close's tapestries that she was moved to wonder in the pages of Artforum: "What would possess any self-respecting contemporary artist to turn to such a medium, with its atavistic associations with the High Renaissance?"

Luckily, Armstrong provides part of the answer to her own question later in the article in what she labels "the boundary-crossing haptics of tapestry." Contrasting the haptic (perceiving by touch) with the optic (perceiving by the eye), she discovers "the paradoxical contradictions of making a furred, tactile object out of the uncanny visual precision of the old-fashioned daguerreotype."

What her article neglects to mention is the role of the the digital age as both catalyst and context for these works: in a world of disembodied cloud computing, where digital ones and zeroes are the currency of day-to-day life and many of us touch our phones more than we touch each other, Close's tapestries (woven on a computerised loom from digital weave files) are extraordinary for their canny, perpetual shift between the optic and the haptic, between eye and body, information and sensation.

Works like Roy and Lucas are physical manifestations of a staggering amount of digitized information, writ large in a medium with centuries of connection to the body (you're probably wearing something made of threads as you read this). These tapestries reference the pixelated character of the contemporary digital image, which Close anticipated in his analog grid works of the last four decades, without yielding one iota of presence in the three-dimensional world of bodies in space.

These works do not exist in the cloud; they exist in a room with you, demanding an intimate confrontation with both their medium -- sumptuously textured weave structures, begging to be touched -- and their subjects, whose personalities, amplified by the sheer scale of the tapestries and the amount of information in the images, emanate from their gazes and expressions like music from a speaker.

As Maria Flores writes in a 2007 review:

As always, Close’s thought-provoking work compels his viewers to pay "close" notice not only to his subjects, but also the processes through which he creates them.

His stark photographs of equally celebrated artists [...] are converted by means of a customized digital loom using 17,800 warp threads, and harken back to the days when fine tapestries hung proudly in castles and chateaus during the 19th century. You’d never guess, from far away at least, that these large-scale jacquard tapestry portraits are anything but photo-emulsions – they are so damn clear and beautiful. But in the intimate gallery space of Adamson, you begin to see the intricacies of the stitching, the delicate transfer of light to thread, the gorgeous, voluminous photos-turned-fabric. Black areas even have concentrated texture, something that is often lost in photography.

Roy, together with Lucas and Close's 2007 Self Portrait/Color, will be shown at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles later this month. Please see this post for more details.

More art by Chuck Close from Magnolia Editions