SHEENA IS A PUNK ROCKER: AN ESSENTIAL AND UNDERVALUED WORK FROM THE BIG BANG OF AMERICAN POP ART IS COMING TO AUCTION TOMORROW, 10/15/2024 + EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: ARCH-POP-CINEMA AUTEUR & MOMA SHOW ALUM TIM BURTON UNLOCKS THE ORIGIN STORY OF HIS DISLIKE OF CATS, CONTEMPLATES UNFINISHED PROJECTS, HIS FAMILY PORTRAIT, AND EXPLAINS HOW IT WAS A BATMAN PINBALL MACHINE THAT REALLY INDICATED TO HIM THAT HE’D HIT THE BIG TIME
By Michael Vazquez
Simply put: Sheena is an $800,000 to $1,200,000 1963 Mel Ramos oil painting for which the opening bid is $75,000 — however, this is not yet another case of some immorally-inflated overvaluation now come crashing to our increasingly, ever-perilously stormy Earth by way of an overdue Pseudo-Art-World reality-check…rather, it is quite ever-purely the overdue recognition of a work which has heretofore been undervalued — and really mis-interpreted, with the latter of course, historically over-informing the former.
And this overlooking and outright misplacement of the inherent significance of the work is now a blessing because Sheena is more relevant than she’s ever been, and the components for curatorial interrogation and proper contemporaneous appraisal are manifold, so I earnestly invite curators the world over to give this work a look before and after the gavel comes down at 1PM Central time on October 15th.
And so, herewith, notes on Sheena, from a native New Yorker who recently placed a print of Mel’s Superman in Congress, is currently working on exhibiting Mel’s paintings in the Art In Embassies program for our nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary, and is eternally dedicated to seeing works by Pop Art Founding Father Mel Ramos on the dear ‘n familiar walls of the museums of his beloved hometown (especially MOMA, The Whitney, and The Met), to the edification and delight of fellow New Yorkers and those who visit us to see our collections and might, I dunno, think a Pop Art exhibit of early female Comic Book Superheroines and Superheroes from the Big Bang of Pop Art, along with some of the most semiotically sophisticated, painterly, critically analytic picto-forensic renderings of the human modern psyche made flesh by way of a Promethean decoding, denuding and deliverance of the daily, human-manipulating behavioral syntax of adspeak, which is both our art and our prison, might be interesting and dare I say it, even cool — whilst also based on a sound curatorial rationale.
Put another way, respectfully in earnest, yet ultimately rhetorically: can any museum’s Pop Art collection be considered canonically complete without a Mel Ramos painting? Hell, even though this isn’t one o’ my favorite works by Mel Ramos, it’s prima facie obvious that Sheena belongs in a museum, be it a smaller one like Geena Davis’ Institute For Gender Studies In Media / Bentonville Museum or MOMA, where a Mel Ramos exhibition (and really, overdue retrospective) could engender ancillary curated events, say, by way of a PS 1 Warm-Up series featuring musos who’ve curated Mel’s paintings for their album covers*** — by this I mean to propose guest DJ sets from Blur, Rage Against The Machine, The Strokes and the Soul Sugar DJs — plus, a Sheena cosplay night, ditto an all-heroes ‘n villains cosplay dance party referencing all of Mel’s renderings at MOMA and PS 1, would be big fun to see, but I digress, and will leave actual curation to the museum staff.
***Fun fact: Mel ‘n Andy are the only two Pop Art Founding Fathers with album covers in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and you can read my notes on the origin story for one of those LPs’ album art HERE.
Returning to the work coming to auction, Sheena was America’s first female superheroine to title her own comic book series (before Wonder Woman, Sheena debuted in ’38, and was a lead character from ‘43 — ‘53), enjoying both male and female readers — and she was a cherished escapist avatar for female readers who had to return to quotidian, gender-circumscribed roles after experiencing more fulfilling lives doing work beyond the household, amidst the war effort.
She’s also evergreen IP, launching several very successful (if odd) TV franchises, a certified cult-classic early 80s movie, and will again be a major motion picture (I also think the current holder of the film rights, whom I’ve looked up, but decided not to contact, would do well to buy this painting and donate it to a museum). Sheena’s also the inspiration for Punk Godfathers-cum-Rock and Roll Hall of Famers The Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”, as well as the namesake and style inspiration for the late Tina Turner (“Sheena” became “Tina”, but the outfit remained).
Ramos’ depiction of the bold adventurous women in his foundational early 60s Superheroines and Superheroes series from which Sheena is culled, sees again the artist as historian-curator, painting for eternity a series which immortalizes, at the gallery and museum level, the secular religion and iconography of Comic Books — including villains; Mel made The Joker a star before there was even a Batman TV series (much less, a trillion dollar movie franchise in which an Oscar would be won twice by different actors playing The Joker). My notes on same, from a show I recently curated can be read HERE.
Sheena is also completely unique among all of Mel’s women in the female superheroines series: a feral, androgynous, queer, butch-femme, she’s almost sui generis — I’d say her closest cousin in the entire Ramosverse is the decidedly more feminine, demure and glamorous ingénue, Wild Girl, which hangs in the National Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian in Washington. Perhaps only in Mel’s Galatea / Pygmalion homages do we find a similar (if not fully formed, per the mythos) androgyny.
Looking at Sheena now, this canonical mid-century work is truly a Rorschach-fun-house mirror for our 21st century — so, again, step right up, meet Sheena: The Queen of the Jungle.
The thermal-current green field is internally aswirl with a resonant, physique-enveloping aura, a quiet storm centered by Her cannily natural gaze of good natured skepticism; of a personhood grudgingly-yet-tactically accustomed to being visually scrutinized. We also find again, Mel’s signature trompe-l’œil and corporeal surrealism (see what you spot).
When he painted Sheena, Mel himself was coming off of the profound transition from painting Modern Man (the kind you see on the covers of mid-century philosophical novels or accompanying evergreen magazine social think pieces) in an Expressionistic fog-vacuum, to depicting said man as a secular god and humanist Pop myth by way of a perplexed superhero — see his human-scale rendering of Pop Art’s official-unofficial Superman, which carried him into the pages of LIFE mag and whirlwinded him on a dizzyingly productive creative cycle — as he was finally emancipated to paint what interested him, all the while serving as curator for posterity–which is why, categorically, Sheena is a Pop masterwork — platforming, Pop-canonizing an illustrative (-originated) image — as opposed to being solely an illustrative work.
Considering Sheena within a survey of contemporaneous production by the other two Big Names in the first wave of Comic Book paintings (notably, of female superheroes) during the Big Bang of Pop, it’s eminently worth noting that for Warhol, tragic archetype Jacqueline Kennedy and exploited femme fatale Marilyn would be breakthroughs, and Lichtenstein’s females were almost always posited in varying degrees of drastic reaction to the male protagonists in their life (seen or unseen), be they an Ophelia, self-gaslighting, cripplingly jealous and insecure, or Giving Encouragement, whereas Ramos’ encyclopedic series of female pioneers stands like so much of his work, as testament to his unique curatorial sense of import.
It’s also worth noting again that Mel’s renderings were often his own variations-cum-character studies (for other examples of this, please see my Joker and Barbie notes HERE) in which he rendered the subject with a universalizing if idiosyncratic trait, rather than, as Roy and others did, recreating the exact work — with a different aim (though this is not to detract from Roy’s work). It’s worth remembering that Mel’s the guy who legendarily traded what would now be a quarter-million dollar painting for a comic book he’d really wanted. The paintings traded betwixt Andy and Roy and Mel also make for interesting stories.
I’ll add that noting where Warhol and Lichtenstein were in relation to the depiction of females during the Hegelian-accidental (or Jung’s collective unconscious, if one must) trio’s first days of painting Comics is not a retroactive indictment, nor is it a knock — rather, it is a necessary, common-sense curatorial elucidation of where this painting of America’s very first female Comic Book Superheroine to title her own series ranks in the Pop Art canon.
Lest those ensconced in more trad mindsets view my notes herein as revisionary, I’ll add that the criteria for lucidly and unimpeachably seeing Sheena correctly as a cornerstone work from the Big Bang of Pop Art are measured and delivered by something akin to the spectral analysis technology that we are currently privy to, now unlocking deeper understanding — dually of the first moments of the actual Big Bang of our cosmos, and, for purposes of applied metaphorical modeling herein, the continued discourse on Pop Art’s cosmology and its Big Bang vis-à-vis (alphabetically) Andy’s, Mel’s and Roy’s foundational Comic Book renderings, and also importantly, the manifold subsequent generations-spanning curations and iterations of Sheena in Pop works across Music, TV and Film, as we can only now see and measure — and it is thus curatorially incumbent upon us to chronicle — where the cultural awareness evolved, and was re-expressed, recombined, homaged, curated, in other Pop disciplines — and in the case of Tina Turner and The Ramones, you have canonical artists (and I say this without being Rockist).
Furthermore, intersectional Pop forensics beg questions of renewed interrogation and further integration by way of several new retinae which vista a sounder curatorial rationale — rather than some hamfistedly retrofitted skewing of analysis in the service of censorship-superimposition upon Art, which we’re seeing too much of these days — which delivers, again, a completely new look at the work’s, I say again, contemporaneous relevance.
Specifically, I say yet a third time, whilst and where language and dialogue structures fail to deliver intellectual synthesis for contemporary societal reckonings on gender and the social contract, an oil painting like Sheena advances contemplation in the way only Art can, thus rendering words possible again, though of course with Sheena’s ever-puzzling identity, those words may only be self-spoken to whosever beholds the work, in that ever-precious, private self-reflexive dialogue which sometimes — and yet, always rather crucially — again, only Art delivers to us…ultimately rendering words possible — or yet, perhaps less necessary, and thus less condemnatory in their finality.
Which is to say, Art in the service of greater self-understanding — and thus, greater societal understanding.
I’ve personally intervened and stopped this painting from coming to auction once before, and in my research, I discovered that Sheena was exhibited in a boldly-titled show in — of all places — Florida, which has seen an executive overreach and purging of its Art. Indeed, one might cautiously muse on how, in a religio-fascist state, perhaps Sheena could be used with thermal imaging to discern via totalitarian technocracy, the State-designated deviant-quotient of a given person, by measuring their reaction to this Sphinx — maybe some of the hypocrites mouthpiecing for a religio-fascist state might see the terror of the pseudo-polis they envision turned on their own repressed self, the rage of which they’ve blindly, nihilistically tried to wield against the world at large amidst their anguish and confusion about existential questions requiring an answer.
One of the key questions is — and I say this quite mindful of museums’ ever-serious need to raise attendance: how often do we get to share this much of a re-discovery, organically within the Pop canon, and really bring it to eyes that are not familiar, yet seek this whenever it’s curated for them?
Simply put, we turn away from Art at our own peril. Pop Art matters more than ever, has more to teach us, and Mel Ramos’ Sheena belongs in a museum.
EXTRA-CREDIT VIEWING: In these four very short clips, Tim Burton tells me about his Mom’s cat-themed shop, and subsequently experiences a catharsis (for which I say I’ll send him a bill). He also talks about the one thing that proved he’d hit The Big Time (a Batman pinball machine); why unfinished projects are difficult to complete; Margaret Keane’s portrait of his family, and its odd detail. I originally produced this for Conde Nast’s DETAILS:
The one thing that proved he’d hit The Big Time — a Batman pinball machine:
On unfinished projects and why they’re difficult to complete:
Describing Margaret Keane’s portrait of his family, and an odd detail:
Notes on tone: this is a blog; my blog — and this is my 50th post at Medium. You can start your own HERE. I am aways happy to learn and share more, and I welcome new conversations.
By Michael Vazquez c. 2024 All rights reserved.
