Mel Ramos (1935–2018)
Mel Ramos, the Pop artist who won polarizing fame with farcical paintings of pinup girls, has died at eighty-three. The cause was heart failure. Ramos often staged his subjects—nearly always nude women—with consumer products: behind Coca-Cola glasses, astride cigars, emerging from candy wrappers or banana peels, leaning against tubes of Colgate, and, in one case, as an odalisque on a box of Velveeta. While acclaim arrived early for the artist, second-wave feminists, including the late art scholar Linda Nochlin, criticized his work for what many have argued is a retrograde depiction of
