The Painter, The Phantom, The Trickster

mel ramos's 1962 painting of the phantom is hilariously grim, a dejected-seeming middle-aged guy in a purple bodysuit with black underpants and boots on the outside, and a black eyemask, sitting in a masonry stone armchair with two skulls on the top corners, all in a black, featureless space,except there is a very strong lightsource from the picture's left, so there are strong shadows of the figure's calves, head, and the back of the chair. so weird, so great. at the smithsonian american art museum
Mel Ramos, The Phantom, 1962, oil on canvas, 49 x 43 in., in SAAM’s collection

I don’t think about Mel Ramos too much, tbh, but when I do, it’s not his superheros that come to mind. Which is too bad, because, like, this painting of The Phantom from 1962 [1962!] is kind of fantastic. It feels like Ramos could have gone in a variety of directions from it, but opted for cleavage.

It looks like it really sucked to be The Phantom, slumped dejectedly in your flagstone armchair with your skulls, in your darkest room, being blasted by the light of what must have been the biggest TV you could get into your lair in 1962.

mel ramos's 1962 painting of the trickster is the white dc comics villain with short red hair and a diamond shaped eye mask, wearing orange, yellow, and black striped tights and tunic and a dark cape and little booties that look like a renn fair court jester cosplay, except the booties are magic, so he's levitating as he runs through a starkly white wayne thiebaud style space clutching two handfuls of stolen jewels. this painting did not sell at bonhams in 2013, but they left the jpg up anyway
Mel Ramos, The Trickster, 1962, 44 x 50 in., oil on canvas, did not sell at Bonham’s in 2013

The Trickster, also from 1962, and on an identically sized canvas, turned sideways, feels like he just knocked off the jewelry store next to Wayne Thiebaud’s bakery. [Not only did The Trickster not sell when it came up at Bonhams in 2013, the lot right before it, a Warholian silver disaster-style diptych of Iwo Jima by Bruce High Quality Foundation, sold for $122,000, so the expectation, the illogic, and and the letdown must have been intense.]

1962 really was just cooking, painting-wise. 15 years after I first read it, I still marvel at Ivan Karp’s stories of how unsettling it was in 1962 to discover Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rosenquist all making similar kinds of cold, numb, paintings from comics and commercial imagery.

But Ramos wasn’t hanging out in the backroom at Castelli in 1962; when he made these he was 27 and teaching art in a high school in Sacramento. Today would have been his 90th birthday. What a world. [thanks to Peter Huestis for the birthday heads up]