In the pantheon of Pop Art, Mel Ramos stands as a provocateur par excellence, blending high art with commercial iconography and a generous dash of humor. His 2008 work, Tea at 5 PM, exemplifies this synthesis, serving as both homage and parody, a visual cocktail shaken with references to Piet Mondrian and Tom Wesselmann. Indeed, this enamel-on-steel wall sculpture brings together a radiant nude, a Mondrian grid, and a Wesselmann cut steel drawing, all seated comfortably in Ramos’ ongoing conversation between eroticism, commercialism, and the canon of modern art.
Born in Sacramento in 1935, Mel Ramos emerged in the 1960s alongside contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. His signature style juxtaposed idealized female nudes with consumer goods, creating a dialogue on the commodification of the female form. His practice critiqued the absurdities of mass media, the commodification of women, and the self-seriousness of the art world itself. By the time he created Tea at 5 PM in 2008, Ramos was in full command of his language. He had moved from painted canvases to sculptural wall works that collapsed flatness and volume, art history and advertising. This piece, part of a limited edition of 125, encapsulates Ramos at his most refined, and most irreverent.
In Tea at 5 PM, Mel Ramos cheekily updates the tradition of the reclining nude epitomized by Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Like Titian’s goddess, Ramos’ model lounges with ease, meets the viewer’s gaze directly, and occupies a domestic interior. Except that here, the classical sensuality is replaced by a hyperreal, media-age allure. Ramos transforms the Renaissance ideal into Pop satire, turning Venus into a centerfold with a Mondrian for a headboard. Indeed, behind her hangs a meticulous reproduction of a Piet Mondrian composition: grid, primary colors, and all. On the right, a canvas intrudes into our space, featuring a Tom Wesselmann cut steel of another nude woman, rendered in thick, elegant black lines, the face left faceless, the body reduced to iconic contours.
Titian, "Venus of Urbino", 1534
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), a pioneer of abstract art, is renowned for his compositions of vertical and horizontal lines interspersed with primary colors. His work sought to distill art to its purest elements. Piet Mondrian famously reduced nature to straight lines and primary colors. His neoplasticism was about spiritual purity, aesthetic control, and the transcendence of form. In Ramos’ hands, Mondrian’s grid becomes a piece of bourgeois décor, a polite background for the fleshy and un-ascetic subject foregrounded on the chair.
Piet Mondrian, "Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue", 1922
Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004) celebrated female form through reduction: bold outlines, candy-colored surfaces, a cheeky Americana eroticism. Another Pop Art luminary, Wesselmann is celebrated for his Great American Nude series, which presented bold, flat-colored depictions of the female form. By inserting Wesselmann’s style into the same frame, Ramos not only honors a fellow Pop Art pioneer but positions himself within a lineage of artists who have simultaneously objectified and deconstructed the female nude.
But, it does not stop there…
Tom Wesselmann, "Monica Seated with Mondrian (Black)", 1988
In Tea at 5 PM, Mel Ramos doesn’t just quote Mondrian and Wesselmann separately, he masterfully layers their references within each other, creating a mise en abyme of modernist iconography. Indeed, the Wesselmann on the right panel is no other than Monica Seated with Mondrian, which is Wesselmann’s own homage to the abstract master. Indeed, it includes a Mondrian-like grid in its background, which mirrors the larger Mondrian painting hanging behind the photorealistic nude in the central scene. This recursive structure is no accident. Ramos is staging a visual Russian doll, where modernist abstraction gets folded into Pop figuration. By quoting Wesselmann quoting Mondrian, Ramos is not just referencing past styles, he is referencing past references and places the viewer in an art historical echo chamber. It is Pop Art weaponized into intellectual recursion.
Tea at 5 PM is a brilliant and vibrant amalgamation of Mondrian's geometric abstraction and Wesselmann's bold figurative elements. By placing the nude, a classical subject, within the confines of modernist abstraction and Pop Art sensibilities, Ramos creates a unique piece that is both referential and original. It is not just Tea at 5 PM, it is also Art History at Happy Hour, with an extra wit on the cocktail.
Tea at 5 PM is currently on view at Markowicz Fine Art in Miami.
Sebastien Laboureau
31 May 2025
