
Isabel Norsten
Specialist, Head of Sale
Sold for US$5,120 inc. premium
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Head of Department, Post-War & Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
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Provenance
Estate of the Artist, University of New Mexico Foundation
Beatrice Mandelman was a central figure amongst the Modernist abstract painters living in Taos, New Mexico, working alongside her husband artist Louis Ribak and close friend Agnes Martin. Introduced to fine art at an early age, Mandelman's studies took her from the avant-garde circles of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock in New York to Paris where she studied under the French Cubist Fernand Léger. Employed as an artist by the WPA, and perhaps frustrated by the confines of the New York art world, she and Ribak relocated to Taos in the mid-1940s where they found and helped develop its now famous creative community. Mandelman's international intellectual and aesthetic training had a profound impact on the development of her formal vocabulary, which was refracted through the prism of New Mexico's light and landscape. In the present lots, Mandelman skillfully translates the brilliance and vastness of her surroundings through a distinct palette of primary colors, the rhythmic organization of Mandelman's forms and patterns articulate land and sky, presence and absence.
Mandelman was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Harwood Museum, Taos, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; and the Denver Art Museum, Denver.