Beatrice Mandelman: Taos Modernist

Robert Hobbs calls Beatrice Mandelman one of the most original and important of the Taos abstract painters. An artist since the 1920s, she moved to Taos in the 1940s with her husband, Louis Ribak, and became one of the leaders of the third generation of New Mexico painters. Although Mandelman worked for the Federal Art Project in the 1930s and was an accomplished social realist, in Taos she adapted the vocabulary of Modernism to the strong light and startling landscapes of New Mexico and developed her own unique style.

In the evolution of her work she has shown the influences of her early teacher Louis Lozowick and friends Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and other New York abstract painters. She also studied with Fernand Léger and Francis Picabia in Paris, but painting in the relative isolation of northern New Mexico allowed her to create an important regional variant of the international modern style. This book is not only a close examination of the life work of a lively and dedicated Taos artist, it is also about how Modernism developed and flourished outside of New York and Paris.