Beatrice Mandelman

Beatrice Mandelman (1912-1998) was one of the important American modernist painters of the mid-twentieth century, whose long career carried her from the New York art community of the 1930s to the extraordinary Taos Modern movement of the postwar Southwest. Mandelman's life was firmly grounded in art, with her first receiving training at age twelve at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. This unusually early formal engagement with the visual arts shaped her lifelong commitment to painting and gave her the technical foundation for the ambitious mature practice she would develop over the following decades.

Mandelman was clearly influenced by Louis Lozowick's return from Russia, where he had visited with her parents and given news of the Constructivist movement in art there. This early exposure to the innovations of Russian Constructivism shaped her mature aesthetic sensibility, and much of the vocabulary of the Taos Modern group, of which she was a part, has roots in the Constructivist movement. Her paintings combine geometric structure with warm color and a distinctly personal sense of composition, producing pictures that stand apart from the more strictly reductive currents of postwar American abstraction.

Mandelman found great freedom in Taos, New Mexico, and in the ability to enjoy the history and culture of that unique region while pursuing her artistic vocation. She and her husband, the artist Louis Ribak, became central figures in the Taos Modern community, a small but influential group of postwar artists who brought avant-garde abstraction into direct dialogue with the extraordinary light, landscape, and cultural traditions of northern New Mexico. Together the couple worked tirelessly to strengthen the artistic community of Taos throughout their lives.

At the end of their lives, much of their art and their hard work on behalf of the artist community in Taos is evident at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos and through the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation, which continues to support artists and preserve their combined legacy. Mandelman's paintings are held in the Harwood Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and other significant American collections.