Beatrice Mandelman: Monumentality in the Miniature
These six works of Beatrice Mandelman (American, 1912-1998), offered here on behalf of the Mandelman - Ribak Collection, provide insight into Mandelman’s fascinating preoccupation with color, form, and scale, uniquely filtering the tenets of abstraction through the influence of the western landscape of Taos, New Mexico.
Like many artists who would champion abstraction in the latter half of the twentieth century, Mandelman was part of the Works Progress Administration, working as a muralist and a printmaker from 1935 to 1942. She was friends with artists such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and was responsible for giving them jobs when she worked at the WPA. In 1942 she married Louis Ribak (American, 1902-1979), a fellow artist, and both soon relocated to Taos, New Mexico. Though she was well on her way to meet the same renown as her companions in the WPA, Mandelman ultimately stepped away from the excitement of the New York art scene; she exchanged her connection to the art scene of the big city for the inspiration of the remote southwestern landscape.
Lot 179 | Beatrice Mandelman (American, 1912-1998) | Untitled, circa 1960 | Estimate: $800 - $1,200
Though it was already established as an artistic community, with artists being drawn to the area for the local desert vistas punctuated by the Pueblo architecture of the longstanding Native American population, during the 1940s Taos did not have any dedicated gallery spaces representing abstract art. Mandelman and Ribak closed this gap by creating their own epicenter of modern artists: the Taos Moderns. They founded and operated the Taos Valley Art School from 1947 to 1953, continuing to host artists in their own home thereafter. Though influenced by Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, Mandelman’s works are indebted mostly to the Taos landscape in their focus on horizontality, lively colors, and bold geometry.
Beatrice Mandelman brought the monumentality of muralism to a smaller scale, to allow closer study of color and texture. Though each of these six works are vertically oriented, each features strong horizontals and diagonals cutting through the plane, echoing the long horizons of the western landscape. The colors also echo a more western palette—vivid sky blues, dusty creams, blazing oranges, and rich scarlets. Mandelman’s colors delight the eye while also revealing her fascination with surface and texture. With the strength of the purity of each background layer—the blues of No.7 Blue and Rift #8 (Lots 181 and 184), the creams of Intimate Echose XVII and Rift #6 (Lots 179 and 182), etc.—Mandelman expertly controls the viewer’s access into each of these works, teasing interesting pops of color and texture through geometric shapes scattered throughout the surface, culminating with this texture erupting into the picture plane in the untitled collage, circa 1960 (Lot 180). These bold geometric forms themselves are often reminiscent of the regular adobe buildings so ubiquitous amid the local environment. Each of these works thus bridge the gap between American abstraction movements and the regional love of the native landscape, as emblematic of the rest of Mandelman’s oeuvre.
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Featured image: Lot 183 | Beatrice Mandelman (American, 1912-1998) | Rift #8, circa 1980 | Estimate: $4,000 - $6,000