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Beatrice "Bea" Mandelman (December 31,1912 — June 25, 1998) was a prolific American artist, whose work came to be associated with a group of artists in New Mexico known as the "Taos Moderns". She was born in Newark, New Jersey, the child of Jewish immigrant parents, who imbued their children with their social justice values and love of the arts. After studying art in New York City and being employed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project (WPA-FAP), Mandelman arrived in Taos, New Mexico, with her artist husband Louis Leon Ribak in 1944 at the age of 32. During a professional career that spanned seven decades, Mandelman produced a large body of work in a variety of media including painting, printmaking, and collage. Her work is included in many major public collections, including large holdings at the University of New Mexico Art Museum and Harwood Museum of Art.

Biography

The formative years

Beatrice Mandelman was born on December 31,1912, in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish immigrant parents who imbued their children with progressive social values and love of the arts. By age 12, Mandelman had begun taking classes at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and determined that she would become an artist. Throughout her formative years, Mandelman developed an enduring international sensibility and absorbed influences from various forms of Modernism. In 1924 artist Louis Lozowick, a family friend, returned from a four year sojourn in Europe and Russia and was an important source of information about Russian Constructivism and other avant garde developments abroad. Mandelman met graphic designer and illustrator Robert Jonas, who introduced her to Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and other New York vanguard artists.

Education

From 1930-32, Mandelman attended New Jersey College for Women in New Brunswick, part of Rutgers University, and then the Newark School for Fine and Industrial Art, where she studied with Social Realist painter Bernar Gussow. Gussow had studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and introduced Mandelman to Cubism and the School of Paris. Her plans to study in Paris, however, were interrupted by the death of her father in 1932 and the Great Depression, and it was not until 1948, that Mandelman was able to realize her dream of Paris, where she studied in the studio of Fernand Léger, became friends with Cubist painter Francis Picabia, and undoubtedly cut an exotic figure in her Native American moccasins and turquoise and silver jewelry. <>

Early Career

In 1935 Mandelman moved to a small apartment on University Place in New York City and became one of 12,000 artists employed by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Arts Project (WPA-FAP) as an assistant in the Mural Division and then as a printmaker with the Graphic Division of the New York Project. <>

In 1937-38 Mandelman was sent by the WPA to Butte, Montana, to work in the Project Art Center teaching art to children and adults. Upon returning to New York, she resumed her studies at the Art Students League to learn printmaking, and joined the WPA Graphic Arts Division. She became one of the original members of the Silk Screen Unit, who under the leadership of Anthony Velonis, transformed what had been primarily a commercial medium into an artistic one. Her early prints from this period, in a Social Realist style, were exceedingly elaborate--the first one contained thirty-two colors. The work in this new medium received an immediate and enthusiastic response from both the general public and museums. By 1941, Mandelman's Social Realist works were included in important exhibitions at the Chicago Art Institute, Museum of Modern Art, and National Gallery of Art in Washington. D.C., and began to be acquired by museums. Decades later, silk screen saw a resurgence in the work of a new generation of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. <<<>

Mandelman worked in the WPA until 1942, when it was disbanded. Although her work would gradually evolve from Social Realism to abstraction, her works from this period reflect a leftist political bent that continued throughout her life, and would resurface later in a series of collages against the Vietnam War that she created in the 1960s and 70s. <>

1942 - 1947: Finding a Safe Haven

In 1942 Mandelman married fellow Social Realist artist Louis Ribak (1902 – 1979), a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania. Ribak was inducted into the Army and discharged in 1944 for medical reasons. While still in New York the couple became involved in the early years of the New York School, including vacationing with Jackson Pollock in the summer of 1943, as his career trajectory was taking off. Ribak also became politically active with associates who were under FBI surveillance.

In 1944, Mandelman and Ribak visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the invitation of Ribak's old teacher, artist John Sloan, who painted there during the summers and thought New Mexico would be healthier climate for Ribak's asthma, yet the reasons for leaving New York are somewhat unclear. According to Mandelman, Ribak was disillusioned with the New York art world and the growing ideological rift between the Social Realist and the Abstract Expressionist artists, and was captivated by the beauty of Taos. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, however, suggest another possible motivation, the political climate of the times, and the danger of McCarthyism and Ribak being accused of being a communist. His FBI file contains evidence that his surveillance, which began in New York, followed him to Taos and continued until some time in the 1960s.

Whatever reason, or combination of reasons, that influenced Mandelman and Ribak's decision to leave New York, Mandelman adapted well to life in the Taos art colony. She also fell in love with Mexico, where she and Ribak would go virtually every year to escape the cold northern New Mexico winters. Far from the strictures of the mainstream art world, Mandelman found the creative freedom to develop her own distinct style, which merged an Abstract Expressionist sensibility with inspiration from the light, color, landscape, and cultures of the American West. Other influences derived from Mandelman's love of adventure. Over the years she and Ribak traveled throughout the world for extended periods of time. Like many of their contemporaries, including their Santa Fe friend, designer Alexander Girard, they were enamored of folk art and collected it.

Taos in the 1940s

By 1944, when Mandelman and Ribak arrived, the Taos art colony was already a well-established community of mainly representational artists. Aside from Thomas Benrimo and part-time resident Emil Bisttram there were few local artists working in a Modernist vein, and no local galleries showing Modernist art. Taos offered artists the proximity to Native American culture at Taos Pueblo, spectacular natural surroundings, a low cost of living, and a geographic location that was at the crossroads between the East and West Coasts, making it a convenient stopover on the route to and from Mexico. A generation earlier, during the 1920s, it was this same combination of factors that had attracted the New York socialite and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan to establish herself in Taos with a salon that attracted many of her day's most important Modernist artistic talents, writers, intellectuals, and activists. She took Mandelman and Ribak under her wing and included them in her book "Taos and Its Artists" (1947).

Many years later, the presence of Mandelman and Riback helped to attract a new generation of modernists from the East and West Coasts. A number of these artists, including, Ed Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, and Clay Spohn, along with Mandelman and Ribak would come to be known as the "Taos Moderns".

1947-1953: The Taos Valley Art School

In 1947 Ribak founded the Taos Valley Art School, where he and Mandelman supported themselves by teaching art classes. The school attracted a convergence of New York and San Francisco Bay area artists. Many were World War II veterans taking advantage of the opportunity to study through the G.I. Bill. <>

Along with the other students, an FBI informant attended the Taos Valley Art School. According to Alexandra Benjamin, one of Mandelman's caretakers during her final weeks and former executive director of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation, the unnamed informant would become notorious for providing false information to the House Un-American Activities Committee and was eventually convicted and jailed. The school was subsequently closed after losing GI Bill funding, and Mandelamn and Ribak decamped for New York where they lived from 1954-56 before returning to their home in Taos. <>

The 1950s: The Taos Moderns

During these years the art world was heavily male dominated and the Taos Art Colony was no exception. In the 1950s when fellow abstractionist Agnes Martin arrived on the scene, she and Mandelman became close friends. The friendship between the two women became strained when Martin moved back to New York in 1958, and began her professional ascent. Remaining in Taos, Mandelman was disappointed in the lack of commensurate recognition her own work, despite the fact that this was due at least in part to her own decision to live outside of the mainstream, as well as her notorious inability to get along with dealers. Tensions aside, the friendship between Mandelman and Martin resumed in 1992, when Martin returned to Taos, where she lived until her death in 2004. <>

Mandelman and Ribak's home served as the gathering place for an informal group of artists who began calling themselves the Taos Moderns. Key members of this group included Edward Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen and Clay Spohn. Mandelman was included in a 1952 group exhibition "Taos Painting Yesterday and Today" at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. It was the first museum exhibition to address the development of Modernist art in Taos. <>

Mandelman and Ribak supported themselves, however modestly, primarily through selling their artwork. By the 1950s, Taos was home to over 200 artists and 18 art galleries. To cater to the growing tourist market, and to avoid the inconvenience of shipping art to galleries outside of Taos and loss of income to gallery commissions, Mandelman and some other local artists organized two artist cooperative galleries, the Ruins Gallery, named in honor of the crumbling adobe that housed it, in 1952, followed by the founding of the Taos Artists' Association and its cooperative, the Stables Gallery. In 1955 Mandelman and Ribak also established Gallery Ribak, occasional public exhibitions in their home, mostly showcasing their own work and that of a few of their friends. <>

Despite her close association with the artists of Taos for over fifty years, and the inspiration she derived from the landscape and Native American culture of her adopted home in northern New Mexico, Mandelman never considered herself to be a regional painter, and always self-identified with the major abstract painters of her day, whose work she followed through her avid reading of the New York Times and art magazines. <>

The 1960s:

Mandelman preferred to work in series, a total of 33 starting in the 1940s until her death in 1998. Interspersed were exuberant collages, a medium she first began to explore in the 1950s and continued throughout her career. <>

The 1970s:

The 1980s:

After Ribak's death in 1979, Mandelman remained in Taos.

The 1990s: Mandelman's Final Years

In her final decade, Mandelman never lost her passion for art or stopped painting despite debilitating bouts with cancer. She concealed her hair loss from chemo therapy under a blonde wig that she called her "hooker wig" and continued to dress with flair. In May, 1998, two months before she died, Mandelman was featured in an article in Forbes magazine <>, which drew international attention and sales. Her spirits buoyed by recognition and sales, and propped up by her caregivers as she painted, Mandelman was able to produce thirty-one works comprising the Winter Series. She died of cancer on June 25th, 1998, in her Taos home, at the age of 85. <>

Mandelman-Ribak Foundation

The Mandelman-Ribak Foundation was established in Taos in 1997 out of the Mandelman estate with the mission to preserve and perpetuate the artistic legacies of Mandelman and Ribak. In 2010 the Foundation announced a multifaceted gift to the University of New Mexico's Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, including 72 paintings by Mandelman, 61 paintings by Ribak, an endowment for future exhibitions and scholarship, and the naming of the Mandelman-Ribak and Caroline Lee and Bob Ellis Galleries. In sunsetting in 2014, the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation made a donation of its remaining assets to the University of New Mexico, including over 5,000 pieces of art spanning 50 years. The University's Zimmerman Library Center for Southwest Researchas received the extensive personal papers of both artists, including the notes and poetry written by Mandelman over the years.

<>

8. Collections 5	Personal Life: When Mandelman arrived in Taos, New Mexico, in 1944 there was already an established art colony there, but they were the first artists to introduce modernism. Mandelman had married fellow artist Louis Ribak and they couple relocated to New Mexico on the advice of Ribak's teacher John Sloan. 6	Early Exhibitions: 9	See also 10	References <> <<"Mandelman & Ribak in Taos" (exhibition catalog, essays by Douglas Dreishpoon and Evan M. Maurer), Harwood Museum of Art, 2010>> 11	Bibliography 12	External links: http://www.mandelman-ribak.org