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A very striking Taos Modernist mixed-media painting collage by Beatrice Mandelman, Taos, NM, c. 1950’s
ex: Mandelman-Ribak Estate, Taos, NM
Beatrice (Bea) Mandelman (1912-1998) was for decades one of the foremost members of the dynamic Taos Moderns
art group. She was an experienced, accomplished and well-recognized artist in New York City with an impressive artistic resume working for the Federal Works Progress administration’s art program and moving in a high-level, fast-league Modern Art circle with the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Stuart Davis. By 1941, her artworks were being included in important exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1944, she suddenly pulled up stakes and moved some 2000 miles west to the remote, tiny, one-horse western town of Taos, New Mexico (Population then approximately 1,800) along with her fellow artist husband, Modernist painter Louis Ribak (1902-1979). She lived and worked in Taos for the next fifty-four years until her death in 1998 in the close artistic and social company of her talented Taos area Modernist contemporaries, male and female, artists such as Edward Corbett, Agnes Martin, Thomas Benrimo, Dorothy Brett, Louis Ribak, Rebecca Salsbury James, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Dasburg, Patrocino Barela, John De Puy and numerous others. Tiny little outback Taos during
these decades became a serious, major and increasingly high-powered productive center for American Modernist art.
Above left, view of the Taos Mountains in winter. Below left, aerial view of the Taos River Gorge and Taos Mountains.
Above left photo source and © wikimedia commons. Above right photo source University of Colorado, Boulder, Water Desk. Photo © Mitch Tobin.
And Bea Mandelman was herself an artistic dynamo, known for her forceful, energetic personality and dynamic, powerful work and she left an extraordinary legacy of accomplished Modernist artwork done in Taos. This beautiful mixed-media painted collage piece is characteristic of her most original and finest abstract work seemingly influenced by the earlier work of European Modernist art icons, Georges Bracque, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Joan Miro. The collage is composed of many multiple pieces of cut out paper which are then painted with acrylic paints in bright splashes of primary colors, drawn on with black ink and then re-assembled overlaid in complex, richly-textured, multiple overlapping layers upon each other.
The composition suggests abstracted views of the rugged mountainous high-desert, deep canyon landscape and
deep blue skies around Taos, with built up layers of white painted paper shapes in the painting’s center seemingly depicting what appears to be stylized views of the Taos Mountains and the Taos Rio Grande River Gorge as seen below. Overall, the work exudes and communicates a great sense of power, vitality, kinetic motion and dynamic energy. We should all be so fresh and attractive at 70-ish years of age.
Artists Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak in Taos, c. 1950's.
Photo source and © taosstyle
“New Mexico landscape and culture had a profound influence on Mandelman's style, influencing it towards a brighter palette, more geometric forms, flatter surfaces, and more crisply defined forms.”
-Quotation source and c “Mandelman-Ribak Collection” University of New Mexico Foundation website.
The painted collage measures 22" in height by 17 1/2" inches in width (sight) and the framed dimensions are 25 3/4" in height by 20 1/2" in width and 2" in depth. The collage is beautifully and appropriately framed under TruVue 99%
UV light-protective "Museum" conservation glass in a custom-made, hand-carved, beveled and lightly whitewashed Maple wood frame by Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe, Santa Fe’s finest art framers. The collage is properly signed "Mandelman" in black ink at the lower right and is signed again "B. Mandelman Taos, N.M." on the verso at the upper center with an inscribed notation indicating the "top" of the collage. The collage is in completely excellent original condition and has a completely excellent provenance. We originally acquired it in 2005 directly from the Mandelman-Ribak Estate in Taos, New Mexico.
Beatrice Mandelman’s artworks have been widely exhibited and are held today in the collections of numerous prominent American Art Museums, among them The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The National Gallery
of Art in Washington D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago and, most appropriately and fittingly, in and around her adopted little hometown, The Harwood Foundation Museum in Taos and The New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.
This painting collage is a marvelous example of Beatrice Mandelman’s distinctive American Modernist art work
and of the unique 20th Century Modern art history of Taos, New Mexico, of the United States and of the world
at large. It would be equally at home and equally relevant anywhere in any of these places.
It's also very nice and refreshing to be able to purchase such an accomplished work of American Modernist art
for such a modest sum of $5,000 and change as opposed to the millions you would have to spend on works by Mandelman's old New York art contemporaries and friends, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Price $5,400
Above, Beatrice Mandelman at work in her studio, Taos, NM, c. 1950's.
Photo source and © Wikipedia
