The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
27 March 2025
The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
165

Mel Ramos 1935–2018

You Get More Salami with Modigliani (from the Nudes Album)

1974
collotype in colors image: 14⅜ h × 22⅛ w in (37 × 56 cm) sight: 18½ h × 24¾ w in (47 × 63 cm)
estimate: $600–800
result: $1,270
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Signed, dated and inscribed to lower margin ‘A mis amigos Garry and Sylvia, los pilares de la comunicación Mel Ramos 74’. This work is apart from the edition of 200 published by Matthieu Litho, Zurich.
provenance: Acquired directlty from the artist, Collection of Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett
literature: Mel Ramos Pop Art Fantasies: The Complete Paintings, Kuspit and Meisel, ppg. 156-157 illustrate the original painting

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Larger Than Life: Garry Knox Bennett

by Glenn Adamson

Garry Knox Bennett was a big man. Big in every way. Tall. Fulsomely bearded. Physically powerful. A veritable Paul Bunyan of furniture, with expansive creativity and curiosity to match. Whatever world he stepped into didn’t quite measure up to him; and so, in the nicest possible way, he had to make it that much more capacious.

Whatever world [Garry] stepped into didn’t quite measure up to him; and so, in the nicest possible way, he had to make it that much more capacious.

That pattern set in early, when, as he put it, “the flower people came to Frisco.” (He was a man of Oakland, with a lifelong suspicion of the fancier sister city across the bay.) Having already gone to art school, initially as a painter and focusing increasingly on sculpture, he now discovered himself as an entrepreneur, starting up a business called Squirkenworks and selling handmade drug paraphernalia at a rapid clip. “God bless the hippies,” he used to say fondly. "They loved anything ugly.” 

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I make sure that my pictures […] always have a trace of humor.

Mel Ramos

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