Summer Auction Sales Put Mel Ramos, Pop Art, and Classic Photography in Focus
Two seasonal sales are drawing attention to different corners of the market: the second installment of Mel Ramos: Pin-Ups and Pop, and Select Photographs and Premier Prints & Multiples: Summer Edition. Together, they point to a familiar but timely question for collectors: where do value and cultural relevance still overlap?
The Mel Ramos sale, presented in collaboration with the artist’s estate, is live through July 22. It includes paintings, works on paper, printed editions, and sculpture multiples by the Pop Art figure, with material drawn directly from this year’s Venice survey exhibition, “Mel Ramos: Iconography of American Beauty.” Curated by Elisa Carollo and produced by Ronald Harrar, the show is on view at the historic Palazzo Bragadin Carabba through November 22.
Jason Rulnick, senior international specialist in contemporary art, framed Ramos as an artist who fused Bay Area figuration with Old Masters references to build a distinctly American mythology of feminine power. That combination of technical polish and cultural wit has long made Ramos a useful lens through which to view Pop art beyond its most familiar icons.
The photography market is being assessed with a different kind of scrutiny. Susanna Wenniger, head of photographs, said the team compared the top 50 artists in the photographs market from 2017–2020 with 2023 to the present, treating the pandemic period as an anomaly. The result, she said, is that much of the classic photography market — aside from Ansel Adams — remains well below pre-Covid auction levels. Many major names, including Constantin Brancusi, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Heinrich Kühn, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, August Sander, Paul Strand, and Edward Steichen, are said to be more than 40 percent below those earlier averages.
That gap, Wenniger suggested, creates an opening for collectors drawn to hand-printed analog work and to the idea of collecting art that offers what one collector called “a dividend” every day.
Pop art remains central to the prints market as well. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are included in Premier Prints & Multiples: Summer Edition, a reminder that the movement’s graphic clarity and reproducible formats still travel well at auction. The discussion also nods to the Guggenheim’s “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now,” which reflects how thoroughly Pop art has entered the museum canon.
For collectors, the message is less about speculation than selectivity: the strongest opportunities may be the works that continue to reward looking long after the sale ends.
