Beatrice Mandelman (1912-1998)

Beatrice Mandelman was born on December 31, 1912 in Newark, New Jersey. At age 12, she began taking classes at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, subsequently attending Rutgers University, the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, and the Art Students League in New York.

In 1935, Mandelman was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), first as a muralist and then as a printmaker with the Graphic Division of the New York Project. One of the original members of the Silk Screen Unit under Anthony Velonis, she worked until the disbandment of the WPA in 1942. During this period, she was associated with numerous New York School artists including Louis Lozowick, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Stuart Davis.

Mandelman married fellow artist Louis Ribak in 1942, and two years later they traveled to Santa Fe, NM to visit his teacher and mentor, the artist John Sloan. Finding Santa Fe congested, they took the train along the Rio Grande and a stagecoach up to Taos and decided to settle there. An impulsive and inspired move, it was a decision that would effectively remove them from mainstream art involvement, for which Santa Fe had become an important outpost in the west. While Taos was a well-known within the art community, there were no galleries exhibiting modern art. This changed later in the decade, with an influx of new artists arriving from New York and California. Some of these artists would come to be known collectively as the “Taos Moderns” - a group that included Mandelman and Ribak, in addition to Emil Bisttram, Ed Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, and Clay Spohn.

An intensely dedicated painter, Mandelman leveraged the isolation of northern New Mexico to explore and develop a style that was distinctly her own. Inspired by the light, local color, landscape, and the confluence of diverse cultures in Taos, her work flourished.

In 1948, Mandelman moved to Paris for a year to study under Fernand Léger, and during this time she befriended Francis Picabia. While she was in Paris, Ribak purchased a sprawling adobe house, and when she returned they created an exhibition space in their living room, which they called Gallery Ribak. The couple organized mini-exhibitions there, including a three-person show for themselves and their friend Agnes Martin in 1955.

During her lifetime, Mandelman exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today, her works are included in public collections across the United States, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Beatrice Mandelman died on June 25, 1998 in her Taos home. In the last months of her life, she produced the 31 works in the Winter Series. Over the span of seven decades, Beatrice Mandelman produced a body of work consisting of hundreds of paintings, prints, collages, and works on paper.

Source: Mandelman-Ribak Foundation and Rosenberg & Co.