{"id":1327,"date":"2009-01-27T01:08:38","date_gmt":"2009-01-27T08:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/01\/ramos-the-devil-doll\/"},"modified":"2009-01-27T01:08:38","modified_gmt":"2009-01-27T08:08:38","slug":"ramos-the-devil-doll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/01\/27\/ramos-the-devil-doll\/","title":{"rendered":"Ramos & The Devil Doll"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the NY Times<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Image Is Erotic. But Is It Art?<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

By\u00a0KEN JOHNSON<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/nyt_byline>
\nWALKING out of a Mel Ramos exhibition the other day, my companion remarked on how benignly amusing his paintings now seemed. Back in the 1970s, when she was a younger, more fiery feminist, his works infuriated her.<\/p>\n

\"\u201cDevilTimes have changed, although Mr. Ramos evidently has not, judging from a small (19 pieces) career survey at Louis K. Meisel Gallery in SoHo that includes paintings from the early \u201960s to the present, as well as luminous painted cast-resin sculptural versions of some of his classic images.<\/p>\n

Mr. Ramos is still painting naked, pneumatic women emerging \u201cBirth of Venus\u201d-like from candy-bar wrappers and banana peels, riding oversize cigars like horses and otherwise toying with the lubricious responses of his viewers. What is different is that a 50-year history of ever more sexually provocative imagery in art and popular culture at large makes Mr. Ramos\u2019s paintings now seem comparatively innocent and even wholesome.<\/p>\n

Although he seems to be continually hovering just outside the club door, the serious art world\u2019s velvet ropes have never been let down for him.<\/p>\n

Mr. Ramos always painted on the teasing edge between acceptable and unacceptable taste. In the early \u201960s he made Pop-style paintings of Amazonian comic-book heroines like Wonder Woman and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Thickly painted in vivid colors within sharp contour lines, statuesque women in scanty costumes appear in posterlike compositions with their names spelled out in big, graphically charged letters. In the current exhibition, Cave Girl poses in a white fur-trimmed leather one-piece suit in front of the monumental letters of her name, which look as though they were carved from stone.<\/p>\n

Unlike the women in\u00a0Roy Lichtenstein<\/a>\u2019s paintings, Mr. Ramos\u2019s sirens were not just enlarged, slightly modified copies of comic-book images. His innovation was to model their bodies on those of real women \u2014 movie stars like\u00a0Jane Russell<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Marilyn Monroe<\/a>\u00a0or anonymous magazine models. So despite their nonrealistic comic style, Mr. Ramos\u2019s women had an erotic presence that comic-book women of the day never had.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the NY Times The Image Is Erotic. But Is It Art? By\u00a0KEN JOHNSON WALKING out of a Mel Ramos exhibition the other day, my companion remarked on how benignly amusing his paintings now seemed. Back in the 1970s, when she was a younger, more fiery feminist, his works infuriated her. Times have changed, although […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}