Beatrice Mandelman

Provenance:

Estate of the Artist

Rosenberg & Co., New York

Lot Note:

Beatrice Mandelman was an important figure of American modernism and a pioneering member of the group known as the Taos Moderns. Born in Newark, New Jersey, she studied at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and later at the Art Students League in New York, where she encountered the city’s vibrant avant-garde milieu during the 1930s. Early in her career she worked for the Works Progress Administration, producing murals and prints that reflected the social and political concerns of the era. In 1944, Mandelman moved with her husband, the painter Louis Ribak, to Taos, New Mexico, where the couple became central figures in a new generation of artists that included Agnes Martin and Emil Bisttram. Within this environment, Mandelman developed a distinctive abstract language shaped by both European modernism (she studied in Paris under Fernand Léger in 1948) and the luminous colors and forms of the Southwestern landscape. 

Over the course of a prolific career spanning more than five decades, Mandelman produced a diverse body of paintings, prints, collages, and works on paper characterized by bold color, rhythmic forms, and a playful synthesis of Cubist and Expressionist influences as exemplified in this sale by the present work as well as Lots 24 and 32. 

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