Beatrice
Mandelman, moved to Taos in 1944, [and lived there until her death
in June of 1998]. The complexity of the abstractions, the simplicity
of color, the structures painted within the large canvases were highly
organized. They had a childlike elegance to them, a transparency and
depth that held me spellbound. There were open areas of white out
of which colors, her shapes and forms seemed to explode, like prisms
through the very surface rather than merely refracting light onto
the surface.
—
Ed Sasek, 1982
In
1944, there were few Moderns in Taos, and all of them were considerably
older than Beatrice Mandelman. The young woman was an anomaly
in an
art community still characterized by elderly, male, "old-hat" painters.
Mandelman painted semi-abstractly even before she came to Taos. Abstracted
forms showed up in her work more and more frequently until for the
most part she dropped the use of identifiable subject matter near
the end of the 1940s. Mandelman created complex forms with sophisticated
application of simple colors — earthy grays and yellows in early
work, later replaced by bold colors, a reference to Matisse. Her forms
owe some of the boldness to Fernand Leger, with whom she studied in
Paris from 1948 to 1949. The progression of her work over five decades
in Taos shows the development of what she sees as an artistic "language
or vocabulary," an exploration of repeated forms examined in
great depth, a decades-long meditation on a theme with a continual
simplification
of its elements, though not of its concepts. While her paintings
make no direct analogies to the land, her purpose is to express
in artistic
language her emotional feelings for the land and to convey
what living in this region means to her. Although New Mexico
has served as an
inspiration for her work, the interpretation in paint has been
more universal. Mandelman has made use of planar, sometimes
elliptical
areas of clear color without the presence of line, making the
work feel open, de-emphasizing divisions. In other works, there
are linear
elements which serve as edges or as a flexible grid though
which color zones appear, particularly in the early paintings,
painted in close
values. Many of the forms in Mandelman's vocabulary resemble
the geometric patterns seen in the basketry, textiles and painted
pottery of Southwest
Indians. While her art does not refer directly to Native American
cultures any more than it does to landscape, it is not surprising
that artists from different cultures reacting strongly to the
same
environment would reach similar artistic conclusions.
— Book
Excerpt From: Taos
Moderns: Art of the New by David Witt, Red Crane Books,
1992
